


echo, the echo

by greywash



Series: Post-Magicians 4x13 Fics [1]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: (...sort of), (No seriously bear with me), (sort of), Additional Warnings Apply, BDSM, Bisexuality, Black Humor, Body Horror, Depressed Person Logic, Episode s04e05 - Escape from the Happy Place, Episode s04e11 - The 4-1-1, Episode s04e13 - No Better to Be Safe Than Sorry, Episode s04e13 - The Seam, F/F, F/M, Fix-It, Friendship, Fuck Canon, Fuck it right in the seam, Gen, Happy Ending, Humor, Humorous References to BDSM, Humorous References to Necrophilia, Humorous References to Yo-Yos, Love, M/M, Medication, Mental Health Issues, Muddy metaphysics, Multi, Queer Friendship, Reincarnation, Resurrection, Romance, See Story Notes for Warnings, Spoilers, Therapy, Though I mean:, Trauma, also:, canon character death, canon compliant through the end of season 4, depending on what source you use for the title of this ep, or alternately:, queer romance, repeated character death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-01-15 22:16:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 31,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18508174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/pseuds/greywash
Summary: The summary of this story contains spoilers through 04x13 and is therefore stashed at the top of the beginning author's notes until 2019.05.18.





	1. Manhattan.

**Author's Note:**

> **The actual summary** : 
>
>> Quentin dies. It doesn't stick. Quentin dies. It doesn't stick. Quentin dies—
>> 
>> "I mean," Margo says, "call me crazy, but it seems like eventually we're going to need to do something about this?"
> 
> Guys, it's like 3 in the morning, I'm getting up in like half a minute, I still have like a solid week's work on 39 Graves _at least_ and like 9 days to the deadline, _so of course I am starting my post-S4 long (ish) fic_ , what do you mean, because there was no way in hell I was sleeping without figuring it out. 
> 
> I think this will have about ~~10~~ 12 parts total, we'll see. There should be a little cluster of short parts, posted relatively close together, to tide me/us over until I am done with 39 Graves and can get to the meat of the story, in the last 4 (longer) parts, but that—will not happen right away. So. Just be patient with me! Hopefully this will quiet your inner bears as I hope it to quiet mine!! But yes I have a lot going on and sadly not all of it has to do with fixing the stupid fucking decisions the writers make on _The Magicians_. :[ 
> 
> Under [my usual warning policy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile#warnings), this merits **warnings for consent issues and disturbing content**. It'll earn the rating, but not for a while; it will probably earn it with both F/F and M/M sex; it miiiiight earn it with M/F sex, too, though that's less likely.

"Um," Kady says, and sets down her bag. "So—weird thing happened to me on my way back from Brakebills."

"Is this the start of a joke?" Alice asks, without looking up from her book. "Because—no offense, but I'm. Not really up to—"

"So I ran into Quentin outside a bar," Kady interrupts. All at once, in a rush; and Alice looks up.

"I'm sorry," Eliot says, practically levitating in from the living room, bagel in hand. Well, _practically_ —for all she knows he actually _did_ levitate. That one's never been. Her strong suit, really. "I could've sworn you said you ran into Quentin outside a bar?" he says, sounding—so fucking hopeful, Jesus, he's embarrassing.

"It's not Quentin," Alice says. "All my research, what Penny and I saw in the mirror realm, I'm— _very_ sure that he—"

"See the weird thing is, it definitely was Quentin," Kady says, flat, and then opens up her bag, and digs out her phone, which is wired up to her backup battery, because Kady never remembers to charge it. She unlocks the screen and shows Alice a picture: that's—it sure _looks_ like Quentin, in a hospital gown, looking sort of stoned and very, very confused: squinting at the camera. "I cast Brookshaw's Revealing. It was definitely Quentin. But I thought you might be more convinced by the picture." Eliot is leaning over, with his whole fucking—construction-crane body, trying to get a better look: and then Kady says, "I thought about having him hold a copy of today's newspaper, but then he started to code, so I didn't get around to it, before he died."

The apartment falls totally, totally silent.

"Wait," Eliot says. "You found Quentin, _outside a bar_ , between here and the Manhattan portal, and you took him to the hospital, where he—"

"Died again," Kady says, "yep! I took a dead naked nerd to the hospital, where he died again. I found him wandering around outside a bar, at eleven AM, which—okay, fine, he's friends with you, but he was also naked, which is _really_ not my thing, and he was—really, really confused, and talking about—I don't know, there was something about fucking—birds, or something, and then he threw up on an Audi, so I took him to the ER, where—about twenty-five minutes later—he asked for a cup of water, and then promptly went into cardiac arrest. _Oh, and_ : then his body vanished, from a hospital bed, with like fourteen nurses watching, and I had to answer some—really fucking awkward questions, okay?"

She stops, breathing hard, a little. "Also," she says, after a second, "he drank my latte."

Alice tilts her head. "Before or after he threw up?" she asks.

"Does that seriously seem relevant right now?" Kady snarls; and Alice considers. 

"I mean," she says, "I need to find some books, but—maybe?"


	2. The Metro.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Excuse me," says the woman next to him. "Do you know why we're stopped?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love everyone in this bar. ♥

Quentin tips his head back against the window. Eyes closed. With his eyes closed, the low hum in the background is—soothing, almost.

"Excuse me," says the woman next to him. "Do you know why we're stopped?"

"Um—problem on the tracks," Quentin says, quietly. He feels like everyone is looking at them. "I think the PA said—"

"Service is delayed sixteen thousand, four hundred and seventy-six minutes," crackles the PA, as Quentin gestures upward, "due to a problem on the tracks."

"Problem on the tracks," the woman echoes.

"Yeah," Quentin agrees.

"In the afterlife," she says.

"Yeah," Quentin says.

"Where the metro is—a pig," she says.

"Certainly—a porcine creature of some variety," he says. "It's. Very long."

"It is long," the woman agrees. "It's a long pig. Do you like ribs?"

"Yeah. I mean. What? _No_ ": Quentin darts a look around the other people int the carriage car, feeling nervous. They all look so. _Still_ , like. 

Well. The dead.

"So, you do like ribs," she says. "But you think it's insensitive to admit, under the circumstances."

"I," Quentin says, and then stops. "I'm not really hungry," he settles on, finally; and the woman looks at him.

"Hm," she says, after a moment. 

She has, Quentin is thinking, a nice face: round and freckled. Thoughtful, kind. She looks like she's about fifty. He wonders how she died. "I'm Brenna," she says, finally; and holds out a solid freckled hand.

"Um. Quentin," he admits, and then shakes her hand.

"Nice to meet you, Quentin," she says.

"Uh." He laughs, a little. "Sorry it wasn't under better circumstances?"

"Oh, no." She waves a hand. "I was ready. Heart defect. I wasn't supposed to see twenty." She laughs, a little. "I showed the bastards, in the end, which—well. That's all we can ask for, isn't it."

Quentin looks down at his hands, folded up on his knees.

Brenna clears her throat. "So here we are," she says. "On this. Very long pig."

"Waiting on a service delay," he agrees. "For—"

"Service is delayed sixteen thousand, four hundred and seventy-two minutes," crackles the PA, "due to a problem on the tracks."

"Sixteen thousand four hundred and seventy-two minutes." Quentin squints. "What is that, like—eleven days?"

"The more things fucking change," sighs Brenna; and Quentin leans his head back.

"Yeah," he says, "I know what you mean," and closes his eyes.

This time when he dreams there are—those creepy fucking crows again. Something, he thinks, about—the plains of the dead? They're definitely—plains, in every sense of the word: _Jesus_ , he thinks. _I'm dead and now even my brain is boring_. Are the plains of the dead Norse mythology? Alice would know. The stuff with the crows is Norse, he thinks. It is crows, right? Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory, companions to—. Or—maybe these are just. Birds, how would he know, and then, blinking and dizzy, he's in Montclair. Outside the CVS down on Claremont, actually—and—fucking naked again, this is— _literally_ his least favorite dream and also Jesus fucking Christ, why is he—so fucking—

"Q?" he hears, (— _thirsty_ —) and then he—turns: gasping, "El— _Jesus_ ": because all at once he's having the breath squeezed out of him so hard he thinks he's going to pass out, Eliot pulling him up onto his tip-toes. He's warm and solid and clean and he smells like cigarettes and it's wonderful. Quentin presses his face to his throat, heart pounding.

"You're okay?" he asks. "You're—um, I'm naked and you're in Jersey—" while Eliot is sliding off his coat, sliding it over Quentin's arms and shoulders— "So—I'm confused and also really really thirsty, can I have juice?" because _orange juice_ and suddenly Quentin has never wanted anything more in his—

"Q, you can have six gallons of juice if you just don't go away again," Eliot says, buttoning up his jacket, which at least is long enough to cover Quentin's dick, and then Eliot takes his hand and leads him into the CVS, where he buys Quentin two bottles of orange juice and a pair of flip-flops because the CVS clerk had complained that Quentin wasn't wearing shoes. "Oh my God that's good," Quentin gasps, after basically pouring the entire first bottle of juice directly down his throat: they're sitting on the retaining wall behind the CVS, with zero complaints from Eliot about what it's doing to his trousers, which is. Important, probably. Eliot is holding Quentin's right hand with his left and, Quentin is realizing, a bouquet of peonies, only a little bit crushed, in the other. 

Quentin fumbles open his second bottle of juice. Sips, this time. He remembers—hurling, last time, and Kady yelling at him when it splashed on her shoes."Why are you holding flowers?" Quentin asks, slowly. "In—suburban New Jersey? This is not exactly your natural habitat"; and Eliot's mouth twists, a little. Not meeting his eyes.

"Okay—um." He shrugs, after a second. "We put your name on under your dad's, on his stone," he says, finally. "I come most Saturdays. There wasn't, you know, a body, but I thought—"

"Jesus, El." Quentin reaches for him, just—fitting back into one of those huge, warm hugs that Eliot—that Eliot's always given him. "So I—I did die, that wasn't just—um. Wait."

His heart throbs. Once. Twice—

"Wait." He swallows. "This is a dream, last time I—woke up, it wasn't—": and Eliot's mouth twists up again: it's still not a smile.

"Last time you threw up on Kady, went into cardiac arrest, and then vanished," he says. "We know. Can I call Penny? I want to get you back to the apartment, we're making it—operational headquarters, or whatever, and—"

"I could get dressed," Quentin realizes, "Like—in actual clothes": and then—laughs, and—oh, God, he could take a shower, he could— _drink more juice_ —

"Well, we burned most of your clothes, but we can probably find something," Eliot says, and sets the peonies down so he can get his phone out without letting go of Quentin's hand. "Hey, 23? Yeah, I—need a ride, one passenger. Montclair, down by the—yep"; and then hangs up, just as Penny blinks in, gives Quentin a long, skeptical look, and then says, "That's quite the look," and holds out a hand, so Quentin lets go of Eliot to twist the lid back on his bottle of juice so he can stick it back in his pocket and— 

—jerks awake, next to Brenna, on the Metro.

"Fuck," he says, mouth numb.

"Where the hell did you go?" she asks; as the PA says, "Service is delayed sixteen thousand, four hundred and sixty-eight minutes, due to a problem on the tracks."


	3. Manhattan.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Margo does it, but she also says, "Eliot," voice low and dangerous, "why do you have six Jansport backpacks and a literal _mountain_ of jeans?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Just so we're all on the same page** : I am rewriting Quentin's story [because Quentin's story is also _my_ story](https://medium.com/@greywash/on-fannishness-privilege-and-a-whole-other-grab-bag-of-entitled-millennial-bullshit-81ea4148a6d0), and it is important to me that I both acknowledge the awfulness of what was presented in 4x13, and then promptly give every fictional middle finger I have got to the idea of that as an appropriate, irrevocable ending for a person who is so much like me. This week I have even less time than usual for people who are trying to make me (us) feel bad about myself (ourselves), especially people who are trying to make me (us) feel bad about myself (ourselves) and don't even have the gonads to put their name to it. You don't have to like or want or care about this story in any way, but writing it—looking at the darkness of what we have been given, and sitting with it, and then building it into light—is healing to me, and reading it appears to be comforting to more than one other person who was injured by the finale. If that's not you, then cool! Close tab! Be free!! But if you want to make us feel bad about it, please instead feel free to go fuck yourself, unsatisfyingly.
> 
> Anon commenting is now off. Trolls will be summarily deleted. Have a nice day!!
> 
> (This bit hurts. Part 4 will hurt less. It will probably go up tomorrow.)

Margo walks in on Eliot while he's folding stuff, post-prewashing: "What are you doing?"

"I am," Eliot says, "extrapolating from the fucking evidence—can you hold this open for me?"

Margo does it, but she also says, "Eliot," voice low and dangerous, "why do you have six Jansport backpacks and a literal _mountain_ of jeans? Because if we're going on a field trip—" 

"Look." Eliot tucks a jacket in, then two waterbottles, then zips the backpack shut. "All signs point to—Quentin's going to turn up somewhere again, somewhere near _one of us_ , and when he does, if the pattern continues, he's going to be naked, and he's going to be thirsty. Alice is in the kitchen right now with Harriet and four of her researchers, thinking so hard there's probably steam coming off her, but I'm shit at research and honestly mediocre at best on straight-up thinking, but naked and thirsty is something I can actually do something about, so."

Her expression softens, in that odd uncomfortable way; and he shakes his head.

"I'm okay," he clarifies. "I'm—better than I've been in—months, probably, so—"

"We don't know that we can actually get him back," she says, gentle; and Eliot says, "Margo, if you think I'm wasting another—five fucking seconds of time with him, you're smoking the good crack and I mean, I'd like some, but—"

"No," she says, "I—yeah, no, I know. Um. We should—. Did you ever get the hang of that cooling spell March showed us in second year?"

Eliot. Didn't, so Margo does it for him on the first two and coaches him through the rest: a compact little spell that they tuck into the side pockets of each of the backpacks, so that she and Eliot can go to the bodega for six bottles of orange juice and, after conferencing to see if they can extend it to the front pockets, too, a bunch of those hummus-and-pretzel cups that Quentin, inexplicably, actively likes, all of which need to be refrigerated. None too soon: Margo goes out to the Sephora on Broadway, just missing Kady coming back with pizza, and comes back an hour later with no mascara but dragging Quentin by the hand: he's pale and his hair looks like he got dragged backwards through a bush (Eliot speaks, actually, from experience) but he's there and alive and half-tripping on his shoelaces: Alice squeaks, and launches herself off her stool at the kitchen island.

"Give me your juice," Margo tells Eliot, holding out a hand; while Alice pulls back and says, "I need to know—everything, anything you remember"; and Quentin says, "Um, there was—an elevator, I saw Penny, our Penny—we, uh. Talked": and his voice wobbles, his eyes darting up at Alice, then Eliot. "Where's Julia?" he asks, and Margo hands him two more bottles of juice.

"She's at Brakebills," Eliot says. "Hermione, can we maybe move this to the couch so Q can sit down?"; and Alice looks up from her books, blinking, and says, "Oh, of course, just let me—" so she and Kady start grabbing armfuls of books to relocate to the coffee table, while Eliot gets Quentin a blanket. He doesn't look well, and it's starting to get cold again. The motherfucking turning of the year.

"Hermione?" Quentin asks, looking up at him.

"I assure you it's a term of endearment," Eliot says, while Kady and Alice are arguing, "It's—no, not Nanimo, Nanimo's useless, get—Gonzales and Chang—"; "I mean, _sure_ , if you want to _compress him for shipping_ —"; and Quentin makes one of those little worried, constipated little faces of his, so Eliot shrugs, then sits down against his side. "How're you doing?" Eliot asks; and Quentin huffs.

"I have literally—zero answer to that question," he says, and then huddles in on himself. Hands tucking in between his knees. 

Eliot takes a breath. "Hey," he says, "can I get a hug?" and Quentin scrubs at his face and then whispers, "Yeah—Jesus. _Please_ ": and then turns towards him, wrapping his arms over Eliot's shoulders, while Eliot puts his arms around Quentin's waist. Pulling him tight. He still—smells right, _God_ , he probably—shouldn't, they're not his clothes, he's not—

"I miss you," Eliot whispers, and then takes a breath and says "I've missed you so fucking much": and Quentin mumbles, "Me too," squeezing and squeezing him.

"Hey, how do I get in on this action?" Margo asks, plopping down on Quentin's other side; and Quentin huffs out against Eliot's neck then lets go and  turns the other way to give her a hug, too. When he pulls back, she raises one perfectly shaped eyebrow at him and says, "So, want to give us the Cliffs Notes version, at least? While the two of them pound it out?"

"Oh, I, um," Quentin says, blinking over at Kady and Alice; and Eliot warns, " _Bambi_. Ignore her, Q, she's trolling you." He sits back, looking at Kady and Alice. _Mostly_ , he amends, but not out loud. Out loud, he says, "Um, kids, we're maybe—on a clock, sort of, do you maybe want to—"

"Yes, oh—of course," Alice says, and then starts furiously flipping through a book you could use to kill a man. "Q, what do you—er, are you. _Aware_ , when you—"

"I'm," Quentin says, and then hesitates. "I'm on a—train. Or a pig. A pig train, it's—complicated, but—I keep—I think."

He stops. 

He is holding, Eliot notes, very very still. He looks—

"Q," Eliot says, quiet; and then. Clears his throat, shifting: "Hey," he says. A little more loudly. "Quentin."

"I think I'm dreaming," Quentin says, sounding—wrong; and and Eliot, chest tight, takes his hand. Quentin just—lets him. Fingers limp. "I don't," Quentin says, very slowly, his voice—thick, and a little too low, "I don't—can you. I don't know what to ask for, I don't know how to—prove that I'm not dreaming, I—am I dreaming? I could—this could be—"

As Eliot. Shifts. Quentin is very, very pale, and there's—

"Well, there're a number of spells for identifying constructed realities," Alice says slowly: sweat, just breaking, shining just a little, at the edges of Quentin's hairline as Alice says, "but I don't know how convincing you'd find them, if you're already—" and Quentin takes a huge, hollow-sounding shaky breath as Eliot says, "Alice—stop": and then squeezes Quentin's hand.

"I don't," Quentin says, and then laughs: one of those tight, terrible raw laughs: "Q, it's okay," Eliot says, low, as Margo is saying, "Okay, um—just lean forward, Q, just—there you go, head down between your knees": rubbing Quentin's back while Eliot slides off the sofa. Crouches down in front of him, still holding his hand. "Counting breaths," Eliot says. "Down from ten, okay?": and Quentin nods and whispers, "Ten," and Eliot breathes in with him; "nine," as Eliot rubs at his knuckles. Breathing out: "Eight."

Alice comes over, perching awkwardly on their side of the coffee table. "Seven": her hands folded on her knees. Eliot looks up at her; and her mouth twists, but she slides down next to him, and brushes her hand over Quentin's. He takes it, briefly; "Six," he says, and then, "five"; and then, "four," and breathes in deep, as he sits up. Putting his hands in his lap, and pulling away from all of them.

"Okay," he says. Steadier. "Okay. Sorry, I—"

"It's okay," Eliot says, quiet; and Margo says, "We're getting to be—quite the experts, on panic attacks, in this dysfunctional little household, so—"; and Quentin laughs, a little, wiping at his face, and then looks down at Eliot.

Eliot can feel his mouth twisting, a little. He shrugs.

"I'm really sorry, Q," Alice says unhappily. "I don't want to make you go through it, if it's—um—"

"No, I can do it." Quentin tries to tuck that silly little flip of hair back: it's not long enough. Eliot's chest hurts. "I, um—train, pig, and then—"

"Birds," Kady reminds him. "You were talking about—"

"Um—yeah, there's—this other place." Quentin's mouth turns down. "It's like—it's super boring, like—the train's not exactly the most gripping travel experience of my life but at least there are—"

He stops, paling: and then rests a hand on his chest.

"Shit," Margo mutters, and starts casting—Eliot doesn't recognize it, but—

"At least there are what, Q?" Alice says, sharp. "I'm sorry, but—it's importa—"

"People," Quentin gasps, "there are—other p—": gasping, looking at Eliot, his eyes huge and terrified, frantic, and Eliot nods and holds out a hand, which Quentin takes with both of his, squeezing so hard Eliot's bones grind together. 

"People on the train," Kady says, "and then—a boring place, with birds—"

"Crows," Quentin gasps, and then shudders, squeezing—pulling—and Eliot clambers back up onto the sofa and puts his arms around him, looking over his shoulder at Alice, hunched over at the edge of the coffee table, mouth twisted up, with her arms around her chest, her face turned away. "El," Quentin says, "I can't—"

"Jesus fuck will one of you help me cast this fucking tracker," Margo snaps, turning towards the researchers in the kitchen: Harriet doesn't look up, but the dude—Patrick or Pete or something, comes hurrying over to face her, their hands moving together quick and certain while Quentin tries—and tries—to get a breath, and Eliot whispers: "I'm so sorry, we're going to fix it, we're going to get you back, okay? I'm so sorry you have to go through this": and Quentin manages, "El—" and Eliot whispers, "It's okay, we've got you, okay? We're not going to give up": and Quentin nods, hard. "We've all got backpacks," Eliot reminds him, "How'd I do on sizing"; and Quentin makes a noise that might be a laugh, and then—

—doesn't answer.

And Eliot—

—gasps, he can't—Quentin's warm unmoving body, going suddenly, terribly heavy against him; and Eliot just— _squeezes_ —

"Eliot," Kady says. Quiet.

"I have to," Alice says, thick. He can hear her shoes, uneven tapping as she—stumbles.

Aching all over Eliot swallows. "Timer?" he asks, and Kady says, "Already running"; and Eliot nods, shifting, a little. "Can you help me—" and Margo and Paul come over, to help him shift Quentin, laying him out on the couch. He's not the right color, but at least his eyes are already closed. They weren't, last time, when he and Penny had to fucking—put him on the ground in a goddamned CVS parking lot, casting—, and Eliot had had to—well, whatever, death's just part of life etc etc etc, but—

"I'm going to check on Alice, okay?" Kady says, and then hands her phone to Margo. Eliot just takes Quentin's hand and holds it, for the rest of fourteen minutes and seventeen agonizing seconds, before Quentin's body disappears.


	4. The Metro.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Then he starts thinking about that whole—put a frog in a pot and heat it, and the frog won't notice it's about to be boiled alive, that thing? He wonders if it's true. How slowly would you have to do it, so the frog wouldn't notice? Like—if you brought the water up to boiling in five minutes, Quentin feels like the frog would probably notice and then just hop out. But—fifteen minutes? Ninety? At ninety minutes, he's not sure _he_ would notice if he was being boiled alive, and he's probably smarter than a frog.

Quentin jerks awake, sucking in air: "Welcome back," Brenna says; and the PA says, "Service is delayed sixteen thousand, three hundred and fifty-two minutes, due to a problem on the tracks."

Blinking hard, Quentin pulls his hoodie more tightly around him. Pushing his knuckles against the battering-ram of his heart: the train feels—colder, somehow: like—like waiting on a train stopped in the snow. Not moving, so there's nothing to stop the weather from sneaking in through the windows, trickling in along the metal until it hits skin. Brenna doesn't seem cold, though. Quentin doesn't—he probably should just. Get over it, it's probably because he went away for a minute, but she's used to it, so he should just. Ignore it. The hoodie Margo'd pulled onto him had felt so warm. It was heavier than this one. Then he starts thinking about that whole—put a frog in a pot and heat it, and the frog won't notice it's about to be boiled alive, that thing? He wonders if it's true. How slowly would you have to do it, so the frog wouldn't notice? Like—if you brought the water up to boiling in five minutes, Quentin feels like the frog would probably notice and then just hop out. But—fifteen minutes? Ninety? At ninety minutes, he's not sure _he_ would notice if he was being boiled alive, and he's probably smarter than a frog. It's been ages since he's, like, taken a bath, even, and in Fillory they were usually too cold unless Eliot was goosing the washtub with magic and even then the water barely came up over Quentin's hips even before they—well, whatever, ninety minutes in a hot bath sounds like something he'd probably—whatever. Anyway it seems like a dumb thing to complain about, being cold. Everyone on the whole stupid fucking pig-train is dead, _including him_ , so, what, he's just going to—whine about the back of his neck getting goosebumps, or something? Like, he's pretty pathetic, but that. Would be. _Really_ pathetic. Quentin tucks his hands into his armpits, hunching forward on the bench. Elbows on his knees.

"What happens?" Brenna asks. "When you go back to Earth?"

Quentin swallows. "I mean," he says. "It's not—like, it's probably not actually—real, or whatever. I'm probably just." He waves a hand. "Dreaming? Hallucinating? Do dead people hallucinate?"

Brenna shifts. "Well, I mean, you're not _here_ , when it happens," she says, in a sort of... Reasonable Adult tone that makes him—tense up, for some reason. "So it's pretty clearly not _just_ a hallucination. If it's a hallucination at all."

"I." Quentin's whole body feels—like he's. Putting on armor, under his skin. He tries to push it down, Brenna's—fine, she's. Just being nice to him, so of course he's going to do his best to be an asshole, that. Seems right. He swallows. "I—yeah, okay."

Brenna nods. 

After a second, she asks, "Why don't you think it's real?"

He squints at her. "You—do you think it's real?"

She turns enough to look at him, resting one solid elbow on her knee. "Quentin, I'm on a pig that's also a train in the Underworld, currently waiting on a ten-plus-day delay. I'm suddenly discovering I have an _extremely_ open mind."

He huffs. Hunching up over his knees.

"So—why don't you think it's real?" she asks, quiet.

"I don't know," he says, after a minute. "That's—we're supposed to be—moving on, right? That's what the train is for? Whatever—comes next."

She doesn't answer, for a minute. "What do you think comes next?" she asks, finally.

 _Nothing_ , he thinks; and then—

That low, buzzing background hum, coming up from the walls and the floors. Getting. Louder.

"Nothing," he whispers. Swallowing. "I—I think—it might be nothing, what if it's nothing, Brenna?" He looks over at her. Away. Shaking his head.

His chest hurts. His. Ribs. His fucking—he presses his hand to his heart, thudding under his sternum, as he breathes in, deep. Deep. Deep.

"Okay," she says, very quietly; then asks, "What if it _is_ nothing, Quentin?"

—can feel—tears. This sudden, hotcoldstinging rush of them, just— _pushing_ out of him, spilling over his cheeks and his chin and— "Fuck," he says, and then laughs, thick: scrubbing at his cheeks with the cuffs of his hoodie. It doesn't help. They just keep— _spilling out of him_ , sticky-painful where he dries them and making—his eyes feel swollen, his whole fucking— _heart_ feels swollen, Jesus, why can't he even— "Fuck, I'm so—sorry, this is just. _Ridiculous_ , I don't. I don't know what's wrong with me."

"It's okay to be sad," she says, in that—old familiar gently matter-of-fact way—; and he laughs.

"You know," he says, wiping fruitlessly at his face. "You really sound like a therapist."

"Well," she says, "that's probably because I'm a therapist"; and Quentin takes a deep, slow breath. 

Turning, a little, to look at her.

Her mouth is curving up, a bit, at the corner. "Or do you not think New York licensing applies this far."

He swallows. "I've spent a lot of time in therapy," he admits.

"Oh, me too," she says; and smiles.

He laughs, a little. He's still fucking—crying, Jesus Christ, get it together, Coldwater. "I think my last therapist was technically a dead librarian who used to make fun of me in grad school," he admits.

She pauses. "I—there's a lot to unpack there," she says, finally; and Quentin sighs. 

"Yeah," he says. "I know."

He closes his eyes. He's so—Jesus, he's just so fucking _tired_. He can barely even process how cold the train is anymore. He wipes at his face. It's not really helping. He just keeps—fucking _leaking_ , all over the place—

"What kind of therapy?" he asks, after a minute, when he can finally lift his head up.

"I worked with children and teenagers who were dying," she says, very frankly; and he sighs, "Jesus"; and tips his head back against the window. He feels like a balloon with all the air let out.

"You know, I get that a lot," she says, after a minute; "and—yes, it's sad, of course it's sad, they—don't get a lot of life, and—of course I would like them to. But—I mean, we're all dying, aren't we?"

"Well," Quentin says, "not anymore"; and Brenna starts laughing, and after a second, he starts laughing, too.

"You know," she says, after a minute. "That was my best dinner-party line for years. What the hell am I going to talk about now?"

"God, I have no fucking idea," Quentin says, and then sighs. Stuffing his hands in his pockets. "Are there dinner parties in hell?"

"If it were designed by me, hell would be—one single endless dinner party," she says; and then, "but—honestly, I don't really believe in hell."

Quentin stares up at the ceiling. It definitely _looks_ like the subway: that dull depthless arch of plastic. It always makes him feel, for some reason, very slightly seasick.

"I don't think I hate anyone enough to _want_ there to be a hell," Brenna adds, after a moment; and Quentin says, "You would've fucking hated me," he says, and then closes his eyes.

"Why," she asks, "because you tried to kill yourself?"; and he—

—he doesn't—

"What's with the fucking 'try,'" he says; and then laughs.

"Hm." Brenna slides forward in her seat, a little. "I'm not sure." Back. "You have a heartbeat, though, don't you?" she asks; and he looks at her. "I don't," she explains. "But you keep." She gestures. "Touching your chest."

His heart. He remembers—God, that fucking _feeling_ , like it was—sliding off of someone else's rails, while Eliot fucking— _held him up_ —Jesus. Fucking— _drop_ it, it's just—

"You seriously don't think that like—our bodies in here are more than... like, a metaphor, or something," he asks; and she looks at him, thoughtful.

"I think yours might be," she says, finally. "Because it keeps vanishing. When—whatever pulls you out of here pulls you out of here."

"Oh," he says.

He doesn't. He doesn't really know what to say to that, except—

"How'd you know?" he asks, finally; and she looks at him.

"Half a hunch," she says, very quietly.

He swallows. Nods. "And half..."

She just looks at him, steady. "I'd be a pretty crap therapist, Quentin," she says, "if I couldn't tell that you were depressed."

He swallows. "It wasn't like that?"

She squints at him, a little. "Are you asking me or telling me?" she asks; and he sighs. 

Facing ahead again. Leaning his skull back against the cold empty black windows.

"Remember how I said my last therapist was probably technically a dead librarian," he says, after a minute, and then—

—stumbles, off-balance, on the dried uneven rim of mud under his feet. Looking out over—

—and Alice had asked him, hadn't she, she'd wanted—she'd asked him _questions_ she'd needed to know and Eliot had said _operational headquarters_ and when Alice had leapt up to hug him there'd been fucking—Library books, stacked six high, all over Marina's kitchen island and focus, focus, _focus_ , so:

He is on a vast bare plain. Mud, churned-up when wet and then dried, straggly patches of overlong browned grass, like—probably a lot like what a battlefield would be like, days or weeks later: and then one of those huge, inky-black crows he saw last time lifts itself up from the grass maybe twenty yards from him, and then lands not that much further along, a low dark shape against the ground, faintly moving, and Quentin—starts stumbling forward. If the train was cold, here it's fucking _freezing_ : wind cutting in through his stupid fucking washed-thin hoodie, fog huddled low to the ground everywhere beyond maybe—fifty? a hundred? yards out—he's shit at estimating distance—and these stupid oxfords are—awful, on terrain this uneven; and he eats it about five steps from the crow, and the crow caws at him, and then hops up again, bounding unevenly up into the air. Quentin drag himself up, trying to keep his eyes fixed on the spot where the crow was, and stumbles—over: it's just. Grass, it's just more—dead fucking grass and dried fucking mud, and—and a piece of—Quentin crouches down. Rubbing at the fluttering little scrap of—fabric, he's realizing, it's—fabric: and he yanks at it until the edge tears and it comes the rest of the way free from the mud. He turns it over. It's just—fabric: a sort of—pale yellow, or cream, or something, Margo and Eliot would probably call it, like, _washed sunlight_ , or _buttermilk_ , or something equally ridiculous: just—a piece off someone's shirt, or something. He rubs the edges of it, wondering where it came from. He knows it's not like it's—important or anything, it's just—

—and then he stumbles again, and catches himself on—

—the edge of the Physical Kids piano, his throat feeling, as always, like someone stuffed an entire bag of cotton balls down it, and then left them there.

"Q?" Julia says, and Quentin whirls around; and she makes a pained little yelp, averting her eyes, and then grabs a very familiar-looking grey backpack from the sofa next to her, and tosses it to him. "I'm just—gonna turn around for a second," she says, her voice a little high; while Quentin holds the backpack in front of him. Todd is sitting at the other end of the sofa, looking—interested. Quentin lowers the backpack until it's at least covering up his dick.

"Todd," Quentin says, as neutrally as he can manage; and Todd blinks and then says, "Oh! Yes! I'll just—" and bends back down over his book, highlighting furiously. Quentin looks down. His hands are full: backpack, and then—

"Oh, shit," he says. "Um—Jules, I'm really sorry, but I need you to—take this from me": holding out the scrap of fabric; and she reaches back, still not looking at him, but after some fumbling he manages to get it into her hand. Then he sets the backpack down and yanks out—juice, downs one bottle as fast as he can with his naked hairy knees bent up but fuck it, no fucking shame, he hadn't even noticed, when he first landed, how much it helped just—to know that he'd get something to drink: jeans, t-shirt, hoodie—fuck the chucks, they were too big anyway last time and he doesn't— 

"I'm going to cast a beacon for Penny, okay?" she asks. "If you're almost—"

"Don't waste the time," he says, wriggling into the jeans. "I need to—last time I only stuck around for—I don't even know, but it wasn't all that long, and I need to—"

"It was about an hour, total, but you were dead for like a third of that," she says; and he says, "I was _what_?"; and she says, "Your body doesn't disappear right away," and then, "Alice is making a spreadsheet. I've already started my timer."

Quentin laughs, a little wildly, yanking the t-shirt on: "Of course—of course you are, of course she is. I never doubted you guys for a second. Jules, I need to—can you just... take notes, or record me on your phone, or something, or—"

"I can do you one better," she says, "are you decent?"

"Close enough," he concedes, and she casts a little complicated swoop-and-dip that he recognizes immediately: "Is that—the Monster's bring-me-more-chips spell?"

"Yeah, but it turns out it works on a bowl in any context," she explains, as the big stainless steel mixing bowl from the Physical Kids' underused kitchen _thunks_ into her hands; and she immediately starts casting for water. It fills, shimmering: and then brightens-brightens-brightens, and then settles into—blue: "Is he there?" Kady asks. "Oh—hi, Q, sorry, you've got the hedge answering service, I'm the only one here."

"I'm here!" someone calls in the background.

"Shut the fuck up, Pete," Kady calls back; and Quentin takes a breath and says, "Look, I don't know what Alice needs, and I don't know how long I've got so—can you take notes?"

"Pete could take notes, I can do one better," Kady says, and then, "hold on": and then, peering in at them, the water wobbles and shivers, and finally flattens out, still, but glimmering with a low luminous silver at its edges. "Okay," she says. "Recording—what've you got?"

Quentin nods, unscrewing a waterbottle. "So—most of the time I'm on a train, which is also—alive, it's this sort of—creature, like a really really big, like—think dinosaur big, then go bigger—wild boar, crossed with a really really big—also like bigger-than-dinosaur big—dachshund, it's—on the outside, it's shaped really weird and sort of—it looks like a set piece off _Farscape_ or something, have you seen _Farscape_?"

"No," Kady says, flat, while Quentin is drinking his water, "I have not seen _Farscape_ "; and Quentin rolls his eyes.

"Yes, okay, I'm a nerd, I know, make fun of me after I'm dead again, but for _now_ : it's huge, and sort of weirdly alive and weirdly a machine in a way that—" He rubs his hands over his face. His head is starting to hurt. "It's hard to explain," he says, then admits, "Honestly, it's sort of hard to think about? So—I'm just going to move on, because—there are—ugh, doors, sort of, in the side of the pig, they're—about as horrible as you'd expect them to be, and then you get on the pig and on the inside it looks—almost exactly like the subway. Only it's—mostly really really quiet, and there aren't any ads, and also no one, like, comes around panhandling or masturbates in the seat at the end or anything."

Kady's face twists up, so disgusted Quentin feels honestly sort of— "Masturbating? On the _subway_?"

"Yeah, I've seen it... twice?" Quentin thinks. "Three times? Have you seriously never—"

" _Focus_ , Q," Julia says; and Quentin takes a breath. 

"Right," he says. "So most of the time, I'm on a train, with a whole bunch of dead people who just kind of—sit there quietly, not moving, and there's—well, we're stopped right now, because of some sort of—the PA announcement keeps saying we're delayed due to a problem on the tracks. So we're stopped but most of the time the pig moves and it—it feels a lot like the subway, too, the way it moves, and there's this—sound, this sort of low humming sound that's—well actually, that's not really all that much like the subway at all but it—feels like it _could_ be, and—"

He stops.

His heart is pounding. He can feel it. He can _feel_ it, it keeps—

"And my heart is beating," he says. Feeling. Numb, he can't— "Fuck," he says, and then laughs, wildly: "I can feel it, all the time, when I'm—on the train and my fucking _heart_ is beating, she's—Jesus, what if she's _right_?"

"What if who's right, Q?" Julia asks, resting a hand on his arm; and Quentin puts an arm around her, pulling her close, and then buries his face in her hair.

"There's. A woman," he says. With—that old horrible hot feeling, _inside_ his face, like he's a half-second away from crying.

"I'm really sorry, but I can't hear you, Quentin," Kady says, "and if I can't hear you the spell can't either, so—"

Quentin breathes in, that warm-familiar fancy-shampoo-and-citrussy-body-wash Julia smell, and then pulls back. She's looking up at him, her eyes a little shiny. "There's a woman," he explains, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, "on the train. Her name is Brenna, she looks like—she's about fifty, red hair, freckles, kind of heavyset, I—have no idea if it's important, but she would've been—I don't know, I'd check in—children's hospitals, if you need to find out about her, or something, she said—um, something working with dying kids, and she—she noticed that I—my heart beats. And hers—doesn't, so—"

"Okay, hey, that might be important," Kady says. "What about—can you do magic?"

Quentin shakes his head. "I haven't tried," he admits; and she nods.

"Can you?" 

"Yeah," he says. "First on the to-do list, next time I—die, or whatever, I—Jesus, no one else is there?"

Her face softens, a little. "No," she admits: "she went to the Library—I'm sorry, Q."

He nods. "What about El and Margo?" 

"Fillory," she says. "Inciting rebellion. Do you want to—uh, leave a note, or—" and he laughs, taking a half step back, and says, "I—uh, no, no notes, just—can you tell them I love them and I'm sorry I missed them?" He laughs, again. "I mean, I'm guessing I'll—probably be back soon, or whatever, so—"

"Yeah," she says, with her face—opening up, a little: that warm, lopsided smile that—he's hardly ever seen, directed at him. "Anything else that we need to record?"

"No," he says, then, "no—wait, _yes_ , what am I even— _thinking_ , Kady, I was in the—the stupid fucking. There's this like—it's a totally empty, bare, dead field. Lots of—"

—and then there's that horrible, unsteady detached-seasick feeling, as his heart does—something it's not supposed to be—

"Okay," Quentin gasps, "I think I'm—," and Julia gets an arm around him, snapping, " _Todd_ "; and Todd pushes up to his feet and pelts out the door; "but there's a—hmm," laughing a little, God, he fucking _hates_ this: "crows," he manages, "crows and—and dried uneven mud and—and—," gasping: "And I picked—up this piece of—fabric," he manages, and then closes his eyes: "Holy shit," Julia says, and then, "Kady, hold on—laying him down—"

"Still recording," Kady says, "timer ready—" while Julia is unhooking her necklace, a long thin gold chain with an orangey-pink angled stone hanging from it. 

"Listen to me," she says, underwater. He tries to nod, as Julia wraps his hand around her necklace.

"Call it a hunch," she says. "I'm going to get you back, okay? It's going to be—"

—and Quentin gasps, and gasps, and gasps, clawing at the bench of the subway seat behind him.

"Fun vacation?" she asks; and Quentin takes a breath. Lets it out. Takes a breath—

And then opens his hand in his lap.

It's empty. But. Quentin lifts up his hands, and then—feeling terribly, painfully self-conscious, he starts.

To cast.

It feels— _awful_ , like casting through—drying concrete, or in a room with nearly-no ambient; but then it connects, only just: and Quentin feels—that odd, lopsided, impossible bubbling-up sensation of—God, he doesn't know: "wonder"? "joy"? "swooning fucking gratitude"? Something he doesn't even properly have a name for, fireworks sparking and prickling at his fingertips; and inside him, resounding: _—oh_.

"Oh," Brenna says, in tones of dawning comprehension, "You're a magician"; and he looks at her.

"I—." He stops. "I—are _you_ a magician?" he asks; and the corner of her mouth curls.

"Oh, no," she says. "Pure muggle, all the way. But my sister is."

Quentin swallows. "Sister?" he asks; even though—he doesn't want to know, he knows, he can— _feel_ it, that slow terrible knowledge that whatever comes next is going to be— _terrible_ , but—

"Yeah," she says. "I love her to pieces, but we don't have that much in common. She's an artist. Painter, out in Poughkeepsie. Oh, and she keeps bees. She loves her bees, Gloria."

Quentin just—stares at her. "I—wait," he says. "Your sister is—what kind of magician lives out in Poughkeepsie painting and keeping bees?"

She lifts an eyebrow. "What's wrong with art and bees?"

"I," Quentin says, and then, "—nothing. I—Jesus, sorry, I'm just. That is— _not_ what I expected you to say."

She just _looks_ at him, with this—frank, faintly puzzled expression. "Why not?"

He looks away, blinking. "I—it just doesn't seem—all that much like the magic I live with, that's all," he says.

"Hm," she says; and then, horrifyingly, "Are you a necromancer?"

He blinks. Looks at her. "Is that—a real thing?"

"I don't know," she says. "I'm not a magician."

"Oh," he says, "I mean. Cool. Okay"; and the PA says, "Service is delayed sixteen thousand, two hundred and forty-three minutes, due to a problem on the tracks"; and, after a second, prickling and awkward, Quentin tries to settle back in his seat.

All around him, there are people. Not just—Brenna, with her square hands and red hair and her calm, friendly expression, but—all these fucking people, and he wasn't—he'd barely noticed them, had he? Like—he'd noticed that they were there, but he hadn't even _looked_ at them: all these fucking people, every seat taken, Quentin tucked in a corner with his shoulder pressing into the wall, and across from him the old man with the tweed cap and the walker, and the woman wearing a blue trenchcoat with her hands clasped in her lap; and Quentin can—there's some thing about them. That makes them hard to look at. They don't move. Their eyes are closed, mostly; or staring at nothing, in a way that—

—and Quentin is, very suddenly, acutely aware of his feet. Of his skin, and his heart beating in his chest, and his _feet_ : in the same oxfords that he'd fucking—done the slip-and-slide in, all over that—desolate, uneven mud plain; and after a second, he stands up, and puts his foot up on the bench, so he can start untying his shoes; and no one notices.

Except Brenna, who asks, "What're you doing?" 

With. Great interest.

"Remember how I keep getting yanked back to Earth," Quentin says.

Brenna snorts. " _Fairly_ memorable," she says.

"Yeah,  well I keep being totally fucking naked, when it happens," Quentin says: "But one of my friends—my fucking—clever, sneaky bastard friends, bought a whole bunch of clothes and now they're all going around carrying backpacks, and—" He yanks his right shoe off, then the other, then tucks them both side by side under the seat. Curling his toes in his socks. He's—probably going to totally regret this, but—it's not the real subway. The innards of a pig are. _Probably_ not as gross.

"What's your reasoning here?" Brenna asks.

He shakes his head. "I was just—I keep thinking about the shoes," he explains. "He bought me—I wear an eight and a half, except for back when I still wore Converse, which I—you know, don't, mostly, anymore, anyway, it doesn't matter, except that I always had to get an eight, I think they run big, and—I mean, he could probably dress me blindfolded, underwater, with one hand tied behind his back, _except for my shoes_ because they don't exactly have DSWs in fucking—anyway." He takes a breath. "So he bought me chucks, because—well, it doesn't matter, he bought me—comfortable stuff, a hoodie and jeans and a shirt and everything except for the chucks could've been—literally exactly what I'm wearing, right now, except for how he bought me _Converse_ and he bought me Converse that _didn't actually fit_ , so like—they're _really fucking distinctive_ ," he says. Throat aching. "I'm—there's no way I'm going to—mix them up with something else, I don't—anyway." He clears his throat.

"Okay," she says, very slowly, "and..."

He shakes his head again. He feels—sore all over, and—and fucking _furious_ , he just wants—any way of knowing if any of this is—

"I keep showing up here fully dressed, don't I?" He takes a breath. Rubs at his face. "I don't know, okay, I'm—I just—I want to see what happens, it's not—it's just an experiment, whatever, _probably_ nothing will happen but _that wouldn't mean anything_ , and if—if something _did_ happen—and anyway, what the fuck else am I going to do, just fucking— _sit_ here?" He laughs. "Waiting around to—un-die again, or whatever?"

He looks at her, desperate: that little, curving corner of her mouth.

"I like it," she says. "I think it's a great idea"; and Quentin takes what feels like the first deep breath he's managed in about the past year and a half.


	5. Manhattan.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I keep feeling like I'm doing this wrong," Alice says, after a second.

Eliot's in his room with all the lights out but one, and Lissy asleep on his chest. He breathes in: the weight is. Good, he thinks: helping. Besides she's warm and soft and she makes this little hilarious noise in her sleep, halfway between singing and howling; and then sort of paw-paw-paws at his vest, and—

"Hey," Alice says, from the doorway. Leaning her cheek against the jamb.

"Hey." He sits up, trying to transfer the dog to his lap; she wakes up, though, when he does it, then immediately starts frantically barking and scrambling towards Alice: paws paddling in the air. "How about I just tuck you in for the night, huh?" he asks Lissy; and Lissy barks, tiny stumpy tail wagging furiously, and goes back to trying to air-swim towards Alice. Lissy _loves_ Alice. Alice—

—takes a step away from them, as Eliot's sidling past her to carry Lissy to the patch of sod out on the balcony, for her bedtime bathroom break, and then back to her crate, while she keeps trying to chew on his tie.

"You're her favorite, you know," Eliot says, when he finally has got her to settle down with a stuffed raccoon and made it back to his room: Alice is still leaning against his doorway, looking. Tense.

"I'm, uh. Not really a dog person," Alice says, totally unnecessarily; and Eliot grins at her.

"Of course you're not," he says. "You're the cool kid. Immune to her charms. That's why you're her favorite": and Alice rolls her eyes. "Come on," Eliot says, and tugs her in, pulling the door shut behind them.

Eliot's room, in the apartment, used to be Josh's room, so it has a totally ridiculous round bed and a giant fucking mirror: it's screamingly ridiculous and Eliot loves it, he thinks it's the best room in the building, but he also gets why Margo hadn't wanted to take it. Margo had taken Julia's room, after Julia had moved into Quentin's next door—she'd asked for it—but since Julia's mostly on campus trying to cram three years of formal magical education in her head in under a year, that's become, functionally, the guest room, where the hedges crash, if one of them needs to stay over. Alice lies down on her back, and Eliot lies next to her, the wrong way around.

Staring up at the ceiling.

"I keep feeling like I'm doing this wrong," Alice says, after a second.

Eliot squints. "Which part?" he asks; and she sighs.

"You just—ugh, you got. The _backpacks_ , and you—hug him, and I—"

"You hugged him," Eliot says, quiet.

"—you could see what he needed and you gave it to him," Alice says, flat. "And I can't even stand to stay in the room while he's dying."

Eliot swallows. 

"I did get like—eight months," he reminds her, "to sit alone in the quiet in my head and process the idea that I'd never see him again"; and Alice flattens her hands over her face.

"How are you so fucking— _understanding_ about this," she asks, voice cracking. " _I'm_ not—I love you, but I want him back, Eliot, and if you try to fuck him again while we're dating I think I'm going to—eviscerate you, probably—"

He rolls up onto his side. Facing her.

"Alice," he says. "I'm not going to fuck your boyfriend." He takes a breath. "Again," he concedes. "I'm not going to fuck your boyfriend again. I promise. Okay?"

She shakes her head, lifting her hands. Pulling off her glasses. Pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes.

"What if he wants you to?" she says, unsteady; and Eliot swallows.

"Look," he says. "Okay. Fine. We all know I don't have—the best track record, on this one, but—Alice, if Quentin wants me to fuck him—which, quite frankly right now seems— _really_ unlikely, then I promise you that I am not going to fuck him unless he's actually had a conversation with you. Okay?"

"What, about an _open relationship_?" she asks, her mouth twisting.

"About where the two of you stand," he says, and then—hesitates.

"Hey," he says. "I'm—trying really hard to be honest with you, so—I'm not going to pretend I'm not in love with him and I'm not going to pretend that I don't want him back on." He takes a breath. "A few different levels," he manages, finally. "But—I'm trying really, really hard, Alice, to be—a little more functional and adult about this than last time, okay? And—no, I'm not going to spring this on him as an issue while everything is still so—fucked up, but yeah, I am going to talk to him about it eventually, because I think he and I need to clear the air." He hesitates. "And I think you and he need to clear the air, too. But—I promise you: there will be no bathing suit area touching that surprises you, okay?"

"You promise," she says. "You _promise_ —"; and he says, "Yeah, I do"; and Alice lets out a long, low breath, and rolls up to face him. 

Curling close.

With her glasses off, she has such a—sharp, felinish face: he loves it. Her eyes are really really blue, and she's so good at looking—mean, and over it, and annoyed: all the awful prickly things she thinks, that she hates she thinks, showing all over her face. He loves that too. He touches her cheek, and her eyes flutter shut.

After a minute, she says, "Harriet found two books on mirror realm accidents," quiet. "One was talking about what happened to shards when the accident happened right near a doorway."

Eliot shifts. "That's what we're thinking?"

"It's a leading theory, yeah," Alice says. "Sort of—if he, um—and I know this is sort of tasteless but, if he basically. Um. Exploded?": and Eliot huffs. She sounds really nervous about saying it.

"Well, who among us hasn't basically exploded, at one point or another," he says; and she snorts. "Okay, so—he was in the mirror realm, and he exploded near—oh, you mean the portal to the seam?"

She nods. "So—we're not totally sure what that means," she says. "But there's some suggestion that part of him may have fallen through the seam."

"And he... needs that part back?"

"No," she says. "That's the part we're seeing. That's why he's not, uh. All the way dead, or whatever": and Eliot. Shifts.

"Alice, you know what else fell through the seam," he says; and she nods.

"Yeah, I do," she says. "That's why this is my lead. Did you get a good look at that piece of fabric he found?"

Eliot shakes his head.

"I'm pretty sure it's your shirt," she says. "Or—it's—the Monster's shirt, the—it's screenprinted, on one side, I think it must've—gotten ripped, when Margo axed you, and then the bottle must've—pulled it in, or something"; and Eliot shifts.

"So," he says, and then laughs, a little. "You're saying—there's a chance that Quentin, right now, right this second, is in at least two pieces, one of which is—chilling in the seam between worlds, possibly with—two all-powerful bodiless supernatural beings?"

"Yeah," she says. "That's basically—exactly what I'm saying."

"Wow," Eliot says, "I don't like that at _all_."

"Yeah," she says. Mouth twisting. "Me neither."

He swallows. "Can I help?" he asks, cringing a little; and she starts laughing.

"You don't have to say it like you think I'm going to suggest sticking needles under your nails," she chides; and he shudders theatrically, saying, "What, would that be _worse_?" just to make her laugh. 

He tucks his hands under his cheek, smiling at her.

"Really," he says, when she's calmed down. "I'm not—ugh, great at research or whatever, but I'm not _totally_ hopeless—"

"You're not hopeless at all," she interrupts. "You're fast and you're sneaky and you're one of the most powerful casters I know. You just—are not at your best, maybe, when someone's shoving books at you, so—I mean, we need more juice bottles?" She wrinkles her nose. "Sorry, that probably sounded condescending, but—it's true, and and the attrition on the clothes is going to start getting annoying really fast, Julia asked for more so I just sent her my backpack for now, I figure—you and I or Kady and I are basically—almost always together—"

"Except when you go to the Library," he reminds her. 

"He's never landed anywhere other than Earth," she counters; but he shakes his head.

"Four times isn't exactly an overwhelming pattern, is it?" he says. "Besides, he's such a—mess, do we actually _know_ that he hasn't landed anywhere else? Or are we just _assuming_ , because he doesn't mention it—no, look, we'd better just buy him more pants, I should've just—picked up a full second set for each of us, when I refilled Margo's." 

She hums. "It's not a bad idea. Then we'd have extras on hand," she says; and then—

—she looks at him. 

Really, really looks at him: it is a sharp, evaluative expression. It doesn't really pretend to be anything else. Eliot wants—he tries to look back at her. He tries to—be as unflinching as she is, looking at him; he'd spent all of August so mad at her—how _could_ she have? how could she have _let_ him, how could she have _left_ him—that it had literally, _literally_ made him throw up. Four times. Then he and Margo had gone back to Fillory for the first time and he'd—tried to get over it, basically. 

With. Mixed results.

"You don't want to ask him to pick," she says, very quietly; and Eliot swallows.

"Does he have to pick?" he asks; and Alice says, "Yeah. He does. If one of the people he might pick is me."

"I—okay," Eliot says, after a second. And then. He shifts. "Alice," he says, and then stops.

After a second, she says, "Jesus, just spit it out, seriously"; and Eliot rubs at his forehead.

"It seems—really self-flagellating, for me to be giving you advice on how to keep my boyfriend," he says: aiming for a joke, and missing, badly. He clears his throat. "But—I don't think you should ask him right now, okay?"

She looks at him.

"Just don't ask him right now," he says. "Please."

"Why not?" she asks; and Eliot rubs at his face.

"Because he's in trouble," he says, and then, "and he's scared and lonely and—and I think he's pretty. Fucked up, okay?" as baldly as he can stand; and then he takes a breath, "And if you ask him right now he's either going to pick you and resent it six months from now, or he's going to—come running to me and Margo, because we give him hugs and juice while you're busting your fucking ass trying to save his life. And that's—that's not fair to—any of us, so—"

"You don't think he's going to choose me," she says, flat; and Eliot says, "I don't think it's a choice."

She looks at him. Steady. Her mouth pulled flat, and then twisting, at its corners: "Fuck you," she says.

"Yeah," Eliot sighs, "I get that a lot"; and Alice shuffles over, tucking her forehead against his. Closing her eyes.

He breathes in. Breathes out. She smells like old books and pens and those horrible canned coffee things she drinks; and she's—tired, he knows, she must be fucking exhausted: it takes so fucking much, for her to feel like she's allowed to stop for a while.

"When was the last time you slept?" he asks. "Like—all night, in your bed?"

She hums. "Tuesday? I think?" She shifts a little, blinking at him. "What about you?"

He shakes his head, mouth—hurting. "Not since I came back from Fillory," he admits. "Catnaps, mostly. I sleep better with Margo."

Alice huddles in on herself. "Kady's been—crashing in my room, sometimes," she admits, reluctantly; and Eliot—carefully; judiciously; self-interestedly—says nothing.

Alice sighs, and rubs at her face. "I miss the fucking—relentless spooning," she says. Voice thick. "The way he always—you couldn't just—fucking _go to sleep_ , he had to be—fucking plastered all over you, like, _God_ , it's fucking—85 degrees, Q, I can't even— _breathe_ "; and Eliot feels like he's cracking open all over, his chest and his stomach and his throat and his face, splitting into a huge, painful thing that he thinks might be some sort of cousin of a smile.

"I know, right?" he says. "He's—awful, he used to—when the kid was like seven Q developed extra-persistent wandering hands, too, so the number of times I woke up with him, like—wrapped around my back with his hand down my pants and Teddy standing there, like, 'Papa, what is Daddy doing?'—" and Alice starts to cackle, her shoulders hunching up. "I'm serious," he says, "and you can imagine what it was like, Teddy just standing there, watching, big-eyed, while I'm trying to get Quentin _off_ me—"

"Oh my God, I totally can," she says, wiping at her face, "He's the _worst_ , about waking up, when he's sleep-pawing you, just like—oh, no, just eighty-four more minutes, communing with your tits—": and then—

—she turns a bright, startling pink.

He smiles at her, but she can barely look at him. If it were Margo, he'd say, _They're great tits_ , but Alice is—definitely not interested in hearing that from him; and then "Fucking emergency!" Penny is yelling, muffled, from the kitchen; "is anyone here?" and both of them are on their feet in such a rush that Eliot forgets that he still can't totally—move that fast, and Alice has to half-drag, half-carry him into the living room, when his knees cut out: to where Penny is carrying Quentin, legit bridal-style, over to the sofa, because Quentin is fucking _covered in blood_. His arms—

Eliot grabs at the wall. Seeing—

"Oh my God": Alice darts over, while Penny's trying to get Quentin settled and Eliot stumbles over after her, trying—to get himself together: "Q, are you—"

"Mistake," Quentin croaks; and then, "I wanted to—yes can do magic, mm— _traveli_ —": while Alice grabs at his hand, then turns and says, "Eliot, get your ass over here, _now_ , I can't hold his hand and heal him at the same time, you dick," and then starts to cast: so Eliot stumbles over and takes both Quentin's hands in his, trying not to—to flinch away from him: the huge, open gashes on his— _God_ , his throat and his arms and— "Hi, you," he whispers; and Quentin makes a raw noise that's a sort of—approximation of a laugh and gasps, "Bad—fucking memories": and then flails up and grabs Eliot by the hair and kisses him: once, hard, while Alice above him doesn't even fucking stumble: just keeps casting. Eliot pulls his face back with his heart pounding hard-hard-hard and whispers, "We've got you, okay?"; then says, "Penny, what the hell happened?"

"I'm so fucking furious, it was the first time I could see it—he fucking _traveled_ ," Penny snarls. "He's not—he's not being portaled or teleported, it's not even like the Neitherlands fountains, he's goddamned _traveling_ , but—he's not a traveler, he's not— _a hybrid_ , he's not—his body isn't set up to do it, he shouldn't be _able_ to do it, and that's probably why everything's going so fucking goddamned wrong, I just—"

"So—you can't travel with him?" Eliot asks; and Penny shakes his head.

"I didn't try, not until after he was already bleeding everywhere, I just—I could tell he was about to jump so I grabbed him and activated my tattoos," Penny explains, "I thought—okay, well he can't control it, but I can, maybe if the tattoos are active he'll take me with him—"

"But instead it ripped half his veins open," Eliot says; and Alice bursts out, "Fuck, fuck, _fuck_!" while Penny is still nodding, mouth flat, staring down at Eliot. "Q, hey," Eliot says, patting at Quentin's face: he's still breathing, barely: "Quentin, I think this is—a fucking terrible thing to ask you, but—after you die this time, can we use your body for science? Light to moderate upper-body nudity may be required."

Quentin nods, once, twice, _hard_ , and then says, "No—fucking—" and then his mouth moves, barely; and Eliot leans in.

"One more time, Q?" Eliot asks, and Quentin breathes, "— _blindfolds_ ": and Eliot starts laughing, helplessly, his entire fucking heart a knot in his chest while he squeezes Quentin's blood-sticky hand in his hand, as slowly it gets heavier, and heavier, and then goes limp.

"I can't do it," Alice says, sounding—furious: "I can't fucking—nothing's fucking _connecting_ , it's like he's—covered in oil, or something, nothing I cast actually _hits_ him, I can't get the bleeding to stop"; and Eliot shakes his head, pushing up to his feet, and laying Quentin's hand gently across his bloody t-shirt.

"It doesn't matter," Eliot says. "He's, you know." He breathes in, deep: "dead again, or—whatever—" Swallowing around the—stupid pointless fucking ache in his throat. It doesn't matter. It doesn't fucking— "Penny, we need Kady," he says, "right fucking now—do you know where she is?"

"Kady? Why?" Penny asks. "She's been up to her armpits in hedge business, she won't come without a reason—"; and Eliot groans.

"We need her specialist skillset, and we need it in a hurry," he says. "We've got—what, fifteen minutes, seems to be about average? So we need her in, max, five."

"She's not going to just—"

"Magical tattoos?" Alice interrupts, and when Eliot looks at her, she nods. Eyes sharp; with him, mostly: "But we can't anchor him now," she says. "He's not fucking— _in there_ "; and Eliot shakes his head.

"No," he says. "But we can't get a tracking spell to connect to his body, every time he gets jerked away from here—fine. Can we _tattoo_ one onto him?"; and Alice's eyes widen, as Penny says, "Okay, that's a reason"; and jumps.

"Oh," she says. "That's—good, I like that."

"Well, I get like one good idea a year, so." He shrugs, and crouches down by the sofa. "Come down here and help me get his hoodie off."


	6. The Plains.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Above him the sky is a pale, washed-out sort of grey; and it's cold, it's still so— _fucking_ cold—

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a reminder, the only warnings I generally use in a fictional context are _disturbing content_ , _consent issues_ , and _underage sex_. This story has (and has always had) warnings for **disturbing content and consent issues** , and I'm not going to go further than that on a warnings front publicly. If there's another specific thing you need warnings for, **please[email me](mailto:greywash@gmail.com)**; it's way, way easier for me to know how to warn if I can talk to you privately and we can have some back and forth about it [example: does this story contain infidelity? I don't know, what do you consider "infidelity"? let's chat.]. I keep requests for warnings private and always reply to them as genuinely and thoroughly as I possibly can.
> 
> All that said, I am making even more of an effort on this story than I usually do to make sure that my tags appropriately frame what you're in for from a _tonal_ perspective (rather than a _content_ perspective; I never use tags as content warnings), since the fandom right now is in such a raw place emotionally.
> 
> All of this is an extremely long-winded way of contextualizing the following: I wanted to explicitly point out here that I am adding **body horror** and **depressed person logic** tags with this chapter, because I think they sort of—shift the impression of the overall tone one gets from the tags in a way I find important and useful. Anyway, I'm still not ever warning for anything ever other than my three blanket warning categories, if you need/want another warning please contact me privately; but I mention the tag change here since I never know how closely people read the tags after Ch. 1. Hopefully that's useful! 
> 
> [I have not been, by and large, having these beta'ed, but I did get multiple read-throughs on this one. All my thank-yous to **breathedout** for the beta, and **petra** and **templemarker** for sensitivity reader back-up for queer mental health issues. I am both bi and mentally ill but there are a lot of reasons why I didn't want to post this one on the weight of a single perspective.]

Quentin jerks back into consciousness panting heart racing, as always, stumbling forward, and he feels—way, way fucking worse than he—then he did, he has, when he—woke up on the train when he woke up from Earth but he's not on the train as he catches his palms, scraping them open on the uneven rough-dried mud of the plains.

He takes a breath. Another. Another, and then pushes up onto his knees: his arms are weak, noodle-y and shaking: he pushes his hair back, fruitlessly. His hands are—

—sticky.

He takes a breath.

Above him the sky is a pale, washed-out sort of grey; and it's cold, it's still so— _fucking_ cold—because. Because his clothes are wet. Because he's.

Covered in blood.

And Eliot had had to see—fuck. _Eliot_ , after everything Quentin'd put him through back when—: a low hammering flutter under Quentin's ribs, Jesus Christ he's dead and he can't stop— _hurting_ them—no. Fuck. Stop. It wasn't—he didn't fucking—slit his wrists open, he didn't—it was an accident. It was an accident, it was an _accident_ : and Quentin shoves his sleeves up, hands shaking—but now his forearms aren't even—they're just. _Skin_ , whole skin, unbroken: he's not even— _hurt_ , except for—for the scrapes on his palms. He peels his sticky-wet hoodie off, because he can't— _stand_ it, the cold sticking weight of it clinging to him, leaving dark-red smears all over his hands and arms and—underneath, his shirt is—better, sort of: there's still blood all over the front, but. The back feels okay, mostly. His jeans are a mess. His too-big chucks. If it weren't so fucking cold—

—if it weren't so fucking cold.

On the plains.

Quentin looks up. Blinking: far, far away, a crow lifts up from the ground, cawing as it bounds—up. Towards another: whirling high up in the grey, featureless sky.

A sharp, stabbing pain digs into his right arm, high up, near his shoulder: "Jesus— _fuck_ :" he shoves at his sleeve, but there's—nothing. Nothing, there's nothing there—

—and then—

—then there is an odd, amberish curl of— _something_ , of some kind of strange, familiar-wrong magic peeling—peeling his skin back, peeling him open down to fat-muscle-bone, his veins opening-closing-opening like—like a plant that blooms and curls closed and blooms with the sun as it is splitting him open and then—then _putting him back together again_ while he pants, horrified, unmoving, and then he sees—

—just for a second, his vision splits. He is kneeling on the plains with his hand on his whole unmarked arm and his clothes drenched in blood and he is—staring down at. At the dizzying fish-eye perspective on Kady's apartment with someone holding his arm in one place with their hands placed carefully in between all the cuts while someone else is mopping a warm wet cloth, very gently, at the blood smeared all over his—his skin where he still actually has skin and someone—someone else is—bending—over him—with her—her _hair_ all that hair he used to find in knots and dust bunnies on the floor of his dorm room before he moved into the Cottage and then he smells, suddenly a harsh, meaty smell like—like having a steak shoved—straight up his nose, or something, and behind that: a sharp-hot-burst of—of ozone—and then—

—his vision slides sideways, down; and then there is—

—that's—that's Lissy, barking frantically, bouncing up and down and barking and scrabbling at the edges of her playpen when did they bring that out into the living room that used to be in Kady's room when it wasn't downstairs at Mrs. Moretti's where Lissy went when they needed to—as Quentin's arm explodes in pain, shattering, under Kady's needle: and Quentin collapses back on the dried sharp ridges of the mud.

Panting.

Pressing—pressing his shaking hand to the meat of his arm. Which is. Whole again. Just—just his fucking arm, and all in one piece.

He just. Lies there, for a minute. He wants—Jesus fuck, he wants—a shower. A fucking _nap_. He closes his eyes.

"Caw," says a crow. Right by his head.

"Fuck off," Quentin mumbles.

" _Caw_ ," says the crow again; then grabs a beakful of Quentin's hair and _yanks_ : "Jesus fucking Christ, fuck _off_ ," Quentin snarls, batting at it, and the crow says, "Caw, caw!" hopping half a yard away.

Watching him.

Quentin blinks at it. "I'm not dead yet," he explains; and then. Sighs. "Or—I am, whatever, but I'm not done with my fucking body, okay? You can. Have it later. Okay?"

"Caw!" says the crow, and then hops towards him. Very, very close.

"Caw," it says. More quietly. And then leans in and pulls, very gently, at Quentin's hair.

Quentin swallows. Sits up. Looking down at it.

"You're not a crow," he says, "are you"; and "Caw!" says the crow, and then hops away from him, before launching itself suddenly into the air, soaring off towards the other, where it circles high up in the sky.

Quentin crosses his knees. Watching them. His shoulder is still fucking killing him—or. Not literally, probably. Too late for that: he thinks; but—the fuck does he know. Maybe. Maybe—not. Above him the crows are circling, high-high-high in the odd, dimensionless grey sky: carrion birds, he is thinking. Inescapably: and then one peels away, flying back down to land in front of him—

—and then—

—there is another sharp, disorienting flare of—of magic. Of—

—of _his_ magic, of—

—of the last spell, properly speaking, that Quentin Coldwater ever cast.

And Quentin takes a breath, slow, watching—watching his own goddamned fucking mending magic, mirror-reversed, sinking into the crow feathers-flesh-hollow bones the way he'd watched it crawling around inside of him: peeling the bird open down to meat and blood and golden mist, hovering ripped-apart in front of him, just for an instant, before it starts—

—it starts weaving—weaving his body together again. Not—not a bird and not-not a bird but fingers-feathers-face: and there is a single surreal moment where Quentin can see—both bodies, two bodies that are two of himself and a crow that isn't a crow and—and a Monster that was never Eliot—

—and then he jerks awake, next to Brenna, on the train.

"There you are," she says: slow, sleepy. "I was starting to wonder if I should worry"; just as the PA crackles, "Service is delayed fourteen thousand, nine hundred and sixty-four minutes, due to a problem on the tracks."

Quentin takes a breath.

"What was it?" he asks.

"Um." She yawns. "Fifteen five sixty. Right after you left."

He swallows. "That's almost ten hours," he says.

She hums. Eyes closed.

"Brenna," he says, sharp. "Wake up. Please, _please_ , I—I need you, I still need your help": and she lifts her head, blinking at him.

Smiles, a little. "Sorry," she says. "I'm just."

"No," he says. Throat tight. "No, I—I get it": looking over at the other passengers, waiting, all of them vacant, silent, stilled.

Brenna rubs at her face. "It wasn't—" She yawns again. "I take it it. Wasn't ten hours, for you": and Quentin. Tries to think.

"I don't think it could have been?" He swallows. "I was—um, I was in Fillory, with a friend of mine, for—"

"Fillory's real?" she asks, sharp, straightening up; and Quentin says, "What? Oh—yeah, it's—well, it's a long story, I'll tell you anything about it you want to know, but first, I need to figure out—I was in Fillory, with Penny, for maybe—"

He can't remember.

"I don't know," he says. "It felt like—I don't know, twenty or thirty minutes in Fillory, maybe, and then another five? ten? on Earth? I was— _really_ disoriented, that time, he had to help me—uh. It was. Embarrassing, basically, I sort of—melted down, kind of, and then—we talked for a while about, um—"

He tries to remember. "I know that I remembered to tell him that I could cast," he says, slowly. "I'm not sure I told him about the timer—shit. I should've tried casting in the plains."

"The plains?" she asks, turning towards him, a little.

He swallows. That odd, lopsided moment of dual—triple—quadruple vision—: looking at a crow who was him looking at him who was the Monster who looked like Eliot.

"There's. Another place." He takes a breath. "I've never woken up there on my way back before, only—on my way out, I guess, but there's, like, this old, dead field: a little dried-up grass, but mostly mud, honestly, and then—a crow." He shifts, a little, realizing— "Two crows," he says. Remembering—

Lissy had barked at the Monster, too. He had—wanted to play with her, and Kady had freaked the fuck out, the one time Quentin had just sat with him and watched, numb all over, while he'd done it. It had been fine. Quentin had known it would be fine. He hadn't been able to explain it, to Kady, that he knew that the Monster wouldn't hurt Lissy, but Quentin _had_ known that, and the Monster didn't. He had just wanted to play with her. It just hadn't—been _valuable_ to the Monster, hurting a puppy, so—so he didn't do it. He wouldn't've done it. He had been—really gentle, actually: the way that he was always gentle with things he didn't need anything from, rubbing Eliot's big hands over her head, while Quentin sat next to them with his hands folded up in his lap and his throat still bruised and aching and watched mutely while the Monster held Lissy up in front of his face, cooing for kisses, while she wagged her entire back half so hard it blurred; while she licked, overjoyed, at his nose. After that Lissy had barked at him, delirious with excitement, every time they'd crossed paths with Kady whisking her away to Mrs. Moretti's: _Hi, lucky puppy_ , the Monster would call after them, and Kady would say, _She says hi, too!_ , in a falsely bright, cheerful forced voice, over Lissy's over-ecstatic puppy barking, and then vanish; and the Monster would go back to petting Quentin, instead.

"Two crows that aren't crows," he explains. "And one of them—one of them. I sort of—know him, I—"

That weird fish-eye floating-perspective moment: Kady and—and Alice, and Eliot—and Lissy, barking up at the ceiling. Hopping and hopping, with her front paws scrabbling at the walls of her playpen—

—her nose pointed up at the thing looking down that wasn't, precisely, Quentin.

"How do you feel about dogs?" he asks.

"Mm. Cat person," she says; and he nods.

"My friend Alice too." He rubs at his face. "Or. Girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend? On-again off-again girlfriend? Dead girlfriend? I mean, she was dead, now I am, so—I don't know, friend, then enemy, then girlfriend, then—no, that order's wrong." He sighs. Rubs at his face. "I think."

"For my reference, is this part of the discussion a pseudo-therapy thing, or a complicated dead-people magic thing?" Brenna asks; and Quentin starts laughing, feeling—overwhelmed. Helpless.

"God, I don't even fucking know," he says, and then sighs. Leaning his head back.

After a long, long moment, he says, "If I do get back."

"Mm."

"Like, for good," he says. "If they can—save me, or whatever."

"Yeah."

He nods. "I think the only person I'm not at least sort-of dreading seeing is the dog," he admits.

She hums again. "That seems pretty normal, I think," she says; and Quentin lets out a breath. "Pets are safe," Brenna says. "They love us and are pleased to see us and they want, you know—cuddles and walks and food, their emotional needs are more straightforward than ours. That makes them easier to face, I think, when we feel like we're inadequate to the rest of it."

Quentin's chest hurts. "Yeah," he says, and then takes a breath. "Which. I know you keep—I feel like every time we talk, two hours in you wind up saying I don't have to fix everything, or fix everything myself, or fix everything all at once, all that crap, but—I do feel inadequate to it," he admits, and looks at her.

She nods. "I think that's probably pretty normal, too," she says. Totally without judgement: fuck her, anyway. "You've been in—a pretty dark place."

"I have literally been in the _darkest_ place," he corrects; and she laughs, a little.

"It's true," she agrees. "You have been, literally, in the darkest place"; and he nods.

Swallows.

Sighs. Looking up at the ceiling.

"Do you want to leave it?" she asks, after a moment; and Quentin—

—doesn't know how to answer her.

He is remembering, with the kind of aching, impossible clarity with which he remembers things—when he does remember things—from his life in the past in Fillory, the winter that had come two years after Arielle had died.

There was no reason, really, that it should've hit him so hard, that winter. Arielle'd been dead for twenty-six months. Teddy was six and a half. Finally bouncing back. _Quentin_ had been bouncing back, and he and Eliot were—and then. And then, he had started.

Thinking things.

A plan. _You call me, without hesitation_ , Dr. Morimoto had told him, back in high school, _if you find yourself starting to make a plan_. That wasn't the first warning sign, was it, but it was the first one that Quentin had really—known how to identify, totally unambiguously: like sure, oh, up to here, this could just be regular garden-variety day-to-day crazy, but—when he had started thinking about knives and water in _that particular, pragmatic way_ he had known: this, _this_ is a problem. And so he had gotten himself together enough, somehow, that he could send Teddy to Jorva and Larot until market-day, so that he had had the space and privacy to actually sit down with Eliot and say, _So, I've been thinking about. Some really bad shit, El_ : and then Eliot had gone with him to the centaurs. Rubbing his thumb over the inside of Quentin's whole unmarked wrist the entire cart-ride.

Quentin takes a breath, slow. He is on a train in the underworld. He is on a train in the underworld, looking at the man with the walker, and the woman in the blue trenchcoat. Frozen into stillness across from him.

Asleep.

_Do I want to leave it_.

"Not—not with all of me," he admits, finally; and then takes a long, painful breath.

She shifts; and then, after a second, holds out her hand. Palm up.

He looks at it.

"I'm not actually your therapist, you know," she says. "I'm just—a dead broad on a train. But if you want me to squeeze your hand, that's something I can do. If not—"

—and he takes it, and lets her squeeze his palm, gentle but firm.

Her hand is cool, but not cold, and it feels—real, and solid, and present, in a way that Quentin had half-forgotten things could feel.

"No one needs you to want to live with all of you," Brenna says, very gently. "The goal is probably just—to help you find that space in more of you, Quentin"; and Quentin.

Breathes in.

After a minute, he admits, "I miss them."

"Yeah," she says, quiet.

"I miss—I hate being alone like this," he says, and then laughs. "I hate—the idea of doing this—so totally without them, I hate the idea of—of _missing_ it, everything—everything they're going to do and change and be, I—"

He lets go of her hand, wiping at his face with both palms, eyes wet and aching, feeling—furious at—at _himself_ , at Alice, at Eliot, at Penny, at the Monsters, at the entire goddamned universe, just—fucking _furious_ —

"I wanted to save them," he says, unsteady, "I wanted—I wanted to _help_ them, but I—but I still—I still—"

—and then it just—

— _rips out of him_ : "I still fucking _want to be there, too_ , Brenna, I—I just—"

He gasps. Shakes his head. Wipes at his face.

He is, he is realizing, in _pain_. He feels—he fucking feels like he _died_ , like he spent six and a half months getting alternately patted idly and smashed around by a cruel, clueless godling and then got ripped apart by a nuclear chain reaction of a spell, like it burned through every atom of his body and just kept on finding new ways of ripping him apart; he feels like he's had his heart torn out so many times he's just fucking—ground meat, at the core of him, where a heart is supposed to go; he's cold and exhausted and afraid and alone and there's no fucking part of him that doesn't hurt, inside or out, and—and Kady had still dragged him to the hospital and Margo had still abandoned her eyeliner and Julia had still given him her necklace and squeezed his hand tight-tight-tight and in Fillory Penny had helped him tie his shoes, bitching at him the whole goddamned time; and then brought him to Alice standing over him putting every fucking gram of herself into casting healing spells, while Eliot—while Eliot crouched next to Quentin with his goddamned wrists ripped open, the nightmare that'd woken Eliot up three nights in seven for six straight months and then just—kept going, if somewhat less frequently, for the better part of forty years, and Eliot had just—just held his fucking hand; and yes, _yes_ , _all right_ , _no_ , Quentin's—not fucking over it, he's not, he's tried but he's _not_ , he's still fucking—furious with—with Eliot, with— _Alice_ , too, with—he still wants to scream at the both of them until his throat's so sore he can't—say fucking _anything_ —but—

"I miss them," he whispers, instead; and then his voice catches: there is a slow, vibrating tremble starting up deep inside him, half cold and half—half— "I didn't—I don't want it to be like this," Quentin gasps, and then—just—fucking _moans_ , around the torn-open cavernous ache in the middle of his chest: "fuck, I don't, I _don't_ , I don't—want to be all alone down here, I—I miss them and this hurts and I don't know what's happening and I don't know what happens when the timer runs down and I don't even know if any of it's fucking _real_ , and I—I just—I just fucking want to go _home_ , Brenna—"

"Quentin," she interrupts, "have you looked at your shoes?"

And Quentin mops at his face, hand shaking, and looks down, at—

—at his blood-soaked too-big grey Converse—

—and breathes out.

"Oh," he says, "thank fucking—"

"Service is delayed," says the PA, "fourteen thousand, nine hundred—"

—and Quentin stumbles, tripping over himself, shivering and sticky, his shoulder smarting, to stand face-to-face with Penny on the broad, muddy-grey plains.


	7. The Library.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Am I directing this experiment or not?" Alice snaps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the delay, kids, I've had the 'flu, it sucks, 0/10 do not recommend.

"Okay," Alice says, and then carefully levers herself up to her feet: the cells have all been knocked together—Zelda, smiling in that painful, shamefaced way of hers, supervising the work—to make the biggest cleanroom they have access to: five times the size of the lab at Brakebills, surrounded by stadium-bleacher rings of wards. Alice steps away from the sigil: "Penny, test it?"

Across the room, Sheila is standing at the ready. Kady's leaning by the door, arms crossed, next to Alma, practically humming with nervous anticipation; as Penny steps in, and then closes his eyes.

Alice waits, watching; and then Penny opens them again. Nods.

"If he actually is traveling and we can get him in here, he's not going to get out," Penny says; and Kady says, "I have to—," and Alice drops the wards so Kady can open the door, slipping out.

Alice waits until she's gone, then looks back at Penny. 

"Okay," she says. "First pass—"

"I know, I know, astral projection only, I'm not _actually_ an idiot," he mutters; and Alice says, "Well, excuse me, but _our_ Penny had a pretty fucking unfortunate history of traveling without looking before he leapt. So—"

" _Yeah_ ," Penny drawls, "but I'm not _your goddamned Penny_ , am I?"; and Alice rolls her eyes.

"Am I directing this experiment or not?" she snaps; and he.

Sighs.

Waves a hand.

"Okay," she says: mollified, barely. "First step—astral only. I'll keep the wards down, but—we have no fucking idea how to get you back, if you can't figure out how to do it by traveling, so—"

"First step, astral only," he interrupts, and then tightens his arms over his ribs. "And if I _can_ map it—"

"If you can map it, you come back and compare notes with Sheila," she says. "You can't map it this time, we'll try something else. I'm not losing another friend today, okay?"

His mouth quirks, a little; but he nods, and then sits down, very carefully, at the center of the sigil. Alice turns to Alma, who gives her a little jerk of her head, and then slips out to trigger the quarantine.

 _This is a branch-wide cautionary notification_ , the PA chirps, a moment later. Alice exhales, counting: four—three—two—. _Research is being conducted in the Level Nine laboratory cleanroom, and Level Nine is currently under ward-restricted access for the duration of the experiment_ ; and Alice sets a careful, trembling hand against the trigger for the internal wards, then looks to Sheila, opposite her, on the magnetic-south side of the room. 

Sheila nods, and spreads her hands. 

Alice watches as Sheila casts, careful and slow, weaving the complicated net of hedge psychic-subject mapping spells that Harriett had passed along, in thanks for the goodwill loan of the Library's entire sub-sub-subsection, nineteen shelves, on trans-planar approaches to determining astrological circumstances in crystal lattice transformations. Under Sheila's hands, the net shapes itself together into a long, faintly-shimmering ripple, just-barely visible where it stretches between her hands and the back of Penny's head.

"Okay," Sheila says, finally. "Ready."

"Okay," Alice says. "From here out—no casting, assume the wards are up, you're up, Penny": and Penny closes his eyes.

And they wait.

This is, Alice is thinking, uncomfortably, the power of compromise in action. With Julia at Brakebills and Margo in Fillory, Alice had suggested that one of them remain in Manhattan, and Eliot had insisted— _insisted_ —that if she was going to fucking leave him behind to pine (his words), she at least assign one of the junior Librarians ("Your minions," he'd corrected; and she'd just rolled her eyes) to report to him by mirror. So she's got Alma monitoring the entire _wall_ of meters they'd hooked up to the outside of the cleanroom, like that's going to tell anyone anything meaningful, because they can't afford to have anything that lets light in or out enough to let Alma monitor them directly; so she's probably relaying info back to Manhattan that's just making Eliot more and more anxious while he frantically cuddles Kady's stupid dog and huddles into himself on the end of the sofa. Alice had _told_ him that was what would happen, but did he listen? No. No he did not, because he never fucking does, like how he still insists on going to Q's fake-grave every weekend like _that's_ going to help anything and even though it always exhausts the hell out of him and leaves him basically catatonic for like 36 hours, after—

—and Alice takes a deep, slow breath; and settles her hand more steadily against the trigger on the wards.

Penny's eyes fly open. 

"I had him," he says. " _Fuck_ , it was in that—it's an in-between space, it's like—when everything went wrong with the Stoppard Cube, only colder, I landed—you know how he keeps talking about the plains?"

Alice nods. "Yes, but—you _had_ him?"

"Yes, and he looked at me and said 'It's real' and then he cast that stupid fucking fireworks spell that he and Julia do when they're high and then he traveled again," Penny says. "And now I can't feel the tracker, so—what do we do now, do I just—start jumping from—I don't even fucking know, to Julia at Brakebills, or—"

Alice licks her bottom lip. "If he's anchored to—us," she says, and then swallows. "Then it has to be her, Margo, or Eliot, if—I mean, he's never jumped anywhere other than Earth or Fillory," she says, "and besides, Kady'd be beating the door down by now, if he'd jumped to her, and—" She stops. Breathing in, slowly: around the sharp, hard ache under her sternum. "So," she says, finally. "If you can find him somewhere other than that in-between space, do it. Bring him here, and I'll raise the wards."

Penny nods, and vanishes; and Alice looks to Sheila, who shakes her head.

"Nothing," she says, grim. "He was off my grid entirely—look, I know you don't want to go back into the mirror realm, but—"

"It is way, way too dangerous," Alice says; and Sheila sighs.

"Yeah, it's dangerous, but it's also pretty clearly _relevant_ , Alice," Sheila says. "We have questions that I don't think we're going to get answered, unless we go back in."

Alice smiles, mouth aching. "I promised to protect the flame of knowledge," she says, "not—kill my friends by—hunting down new ways of knowing things, okay? I've—already done that once, I don't want to—"

"Alice," Sheila sighs; and then rubs at her forehead; and Alice tugs the hem of her sweater straight and then paces over to the door. Realizes she shouldn't open it; and then paces back. 

"Quentin died in the mirror realm," Sheila says, after a second. 

"Yes, I was there," Alice snaps; and Sheila nods.

"So," she says. "He died in the mirror realm, where we know traveler blood opens portals, and he died _by_ a portal, and now he's traveling."

Alice crosses her arms over her chest. Feeling—

"This sounds related, okay?" Sheila says, very gently. "It sounds related to me, and I _know_ it sounds related to you, too, because you've got half the subsection on mirror realm portals stacked up in your office and I _know_ that the other half is down in the penthouse because Kady keeps bothering me for cross-references. This is not just some wobbly little almost-possibility of a lead that you can just ignore until it becomes relevant. It is relevant, and it's relevant right now. You don't want a person to go in after him, fine, _send a golem_ , or—"

"Wait, what?" Alice asks, jerking her head up; and Sheila's brows wrinkle.

"Send a golem," Sheila says, sounding puzzled, like, oh, this is _obvious_ , which— "I mean, I've read Margo's book," she says. "She and Eliot made a golem, they could probably—"

"Tell Alma," Alice says, fast, "they'll—fuck, I'm not sure if Margo can leave Fillory, right now, so—I'll have to get—do we have a source on living clay?"

"Sure we do, it's not hard to make," Sheila says. "They do it as their second-year undergraduate term project in physical reanimations in Sydney, they're always trying to get rid of the excess, they'd probably even give us some for free."

"I—okay," Alice says. "I'm still—sorry, I still haven't had a chance to read all the books yet, I'm just—"

"Alice," Sheila says, " _no one_ has read all the books. That's why there's more than one Librarian"; and Alice takes a slow, deep breath.

"Okay," she says, finally. "I—okay." She takes a breath. "I need to stay here. _Kady_ needs to stay here, in case we do wind up needing to tattoo him—"

"I can guide the golem," Sheila says. "Zelda can help me, and we'll get a traveler, to open the portals": and Alice sighs, and scrubs at her face.

"Well," she says, "I'd help you, but I only know the one, so—": feeling very, very frustrated.

Sheila laughs. "Alice, you have the _whole Library network_ behind you, now, _and_ the hedges. How many travelers do you think are still alive? Because—it's not just Penny, and most of them have Library cards. You don't have to do everything yourselves, you know."

Alice stares at her. "I," she says; and then Penny blips in, holding Quentin up by the back of his hoodie, knotted up in one hand, and Margo's wrist with the other. 

"Get him inside the sigil," Alice calls; and Quentin, who is looking very distinctly wobbly, says, "Mm, ngrargh?" but it doesn't matter, because Penny just steers him over inside the sigil before letting go of his hoodie, while Alice is still pulling the wards back up. Her hands are shaking. Margo and Penny help Quentin sit down. He's breathing in unsteadily, audible from halfway across the room, as he puts his head down in between his bent-up trembling knees.

" _Fuck_ ," Quentin is mumbling, muffled; as Alice realizes—fuck. She should've just—left them down, probably, but instead she says to Sheila, "Okay. Look. I'm giving the mirror realm lead to you—go, send Kady in here, then do—whatever you need to, for the golem, we don't want to drop the wards for one second longer than we need to"; and Sheila nods. "Penny, can I take the wards down to let her out?" Alice asks, sharp; and when Penny nods: "Yeah, but do it fast"; so Alice drops them to let Sheila out and then yanks them right back up again. Comes over to crouch next to Quentin. Penny is digging through Margo's backpack, while Margo looks put-upon, one hand rubbing gently against the curve of Quentin's hunched-up back.

"I really fucking hate this." Quentin's voice is unsteady, shoulders curved in, but he lifts his head up when Penny nudges his shoulder and hands him an open bottle of juice, which Quentin takes, and drinks, and drinks, and drinks. Margo lets go of him long enough to get the plastic safety wrapping off one of those terrible pretzel-and-hummus cups for him: Alice hates Eliot, a little bit, for those. Quentin takes it, though. Starts dipping and eating pretzels mechanically, with shaking hands.

"You seem a little more coherent this time," Alice says, finally; and Quentin nods. "So—do you know we think you're traveling?"

Quentin nods again, then shoves another pretzel in his mouth. "Penny told me," he says, while chewing, mouth open: eaugh, very gross, but—he looks so awful she can't totally—; and then there's a knock on the door. Alice has to get up to go lower the wards just long enough to let Kady in, her tattooing supplies tucked under one arm.

"So—last time we tattooed a tracker onto your arm," Alice explains, coming back to sit on the floor while Kady's setting up on a mat just outside the edge of the sigil. Alice reaches over, twitches Quentin's sleeve up: that little blue rune, right on the meat of his arm. "Which is—I mean, it worked," Alice says, "Penny used it to astral project to you, but we don't have enough data to travel to you for real, or bring you back—"

"And you still can't find me on the train," Quentin says, "only in—"

"The plains, yes," Alice says; and Quentin shakes his head.

"I think it's the seam," he says; and Margo stills, straightens, halfway through getting out another bottle of juice. "I'm like—92% sure."

"Q, if it's the seam," Margo says, "then the Monster—"

"Yeah," Quentin says. "I know. He's there, he's—a crow, sort of, and I think he's—um—"

He stops. 

His face is, Alice notes, already pale, but going paler: that clammy, unhealthy glue-color that she remembers, not with fondness, from early in first year. There's sweat at the edges of his hairline, and when he wipes at it, his hands are shaking.

"Q," Alice says, "are you—"

"Where's Eliot?" he asks, all in a rush. Not looking at Alice: she swallows.

"He's in Manhattan," she says. "We weren't sure what would happen to you if no one was there. We still don't know enough about what's—pulling you—"; and then she stops, as Quentin looks up at her.

"I—I need to talk to Eliot about the Monster," he says. Blinking. "He's—he's sort of—the expert, I guess, I—I really need to talk to him."

And Alice breathes. In.

Quentin is just fucking—looking at her, with those huge, scared brown eyes: it's—manipulative, she'd think, except that Quentin has never fucking understood what he was doing when he did it: she and El had drunk two and a half bottles of rosé about it, at one point, in September: _you, at least, didn't also get it in miniature_ , he'd said, voice thick; and then, looking at the label, _Jesus fucking Christ, Alice, what the actual fuck is this shit_. 

"Please," Quentin asks, wobbly, still staring up at her; and Margo sighs, then pushes up to her feet.

"Okay," she says, "so—we're not touching this one": and takes Penny by the wrist, dragging him over to stand just inside the door, Kady following, arms crossed.

"If this is—stuff we're going to need to research," Alice says, finally; and Quentin looks down at his knees. 

Alice swallows.

"I—okay," she says, after a minute. Chest aching. "I'll—I'll send Penny, okay? We need to keep you here."

He nods, and then looks back up at her. "Thank you," he says, quiet, eyes huge, soft at the edges: _totally! fucking! unfair!_ , a small, infuriated part of her is screaming, but she ignores it, mostly: trying to focus on—on how unwell he looks, how tired and how scared, and not. The rest of it, like—how _dare_ he be so fucking _pretty_. He's not, anyway. Alice scrubs at her face, and stands up.

By the door, Margo's hoisting all her Fillorian guerilla warfare layers up in a way that looks, like—simultaneously sexy, and graceful, and terrifying, so she can dig a little flask out of a sort of... hip-pocket/fanny-pack thing, tucked against her thigh. She takes a swig, then passes it to Penny. "Well," she says, looking at Alice. "What's the plan, Prof?"

Alice rolls her eyes. Pushing her shoulders back: she feels—tense. Antsy. "Penny," she says, "can you bring Eliot here?"

Penny gives her a look. Like, a patented, capital-L Look™, his mouth curling, a little, while he does it.

"Don't be an asshole," she snaps. "If this is Monster shit, well—he's right, Eliot's our expert, and—." She takes a breath. "For some reason I actually don't want to keep them apart from ea—"

Her voice cracks, and then.

She clears her throat.

"Can you just fucking get him?" she asks, looking up at Penny; and Penny hands her the flask.

Fuck. That tastes like fucking—nail polish remover, or—

"We're going to have a problem with me coming back in," Penny is saying, while Alice blinks back tears. "I won't be able to monitor him, for dropping the wards."

"We'll risk it," Alice says. "Just—hurry, okay?" Still swallowing, against the burn: "And—Margo, Sheila wanted to talk to you about that golem spell—she wants to send one into the mirror world, can you help her?"

"Oh, yeah," Margo says. "It's not hard. Especially if the alternative is standing here watching you try to have feelings—don't hurt yourself, okay?"

"Fuck off," Alice mutters. Kady huffs, and Alice lowers the wards to let Margo and Penny out.

When she raises them again, leaning back against the wall, Kady lifts an eyebrow at her. 

"You're not going to go sit with him?" she asks.

It's—mean, a little. In that way that Kady's always mean, like she's been over Alice's bullshit since before she met her: smiling at her, like— _make it good, bitch_. Sometimes Alice really, really wants to hate her.

"Would you sit with him?" Alice asks. Managing to muster up a smile, from somewhere, to give her back. "If it were Penny, your Penny, and he was asking for Julia?"; and Kady's smile widens, like—like a gash. A cavern.

"Yeah," she says. "I would." Her voice sounds like—the Atacama Desert, ground up; blended with twelve packs of cigarettes a day.

"Yeah, well," Alice says. "I'm not—you, so."

Kady ducks her head. "Yeah," she says. "I know."

Alice drops her head back against the wall. Looking up at the ceiling. 

She can—feel him, sort of. She knows it's just. Her imagination, the power of—fucking suggestion, or something: just the weight of knowing that Quentin is in the room and she is in the room and _Kady_ is in the room, too: watching them; that—she should—go to him, or—; except that if she did he would just. Huddle in on himself with that awful sick-sweat on the edges of his face and not talk to her, because she's not—the resident expert on the Monster, or whatever, never mind that she's spent the past—six weeks, four months, eternity, _whatever_ , up to her ears in the Library stacks trying to just—just pull up—some fucking _answers_ —

There's knock on the door. Alice takes a breath. "Ready?" she asks.

Kady snorts. "What the hell do I need to be ready for?" she asks. "If he's going to bounce the instant the wards drop, there's nothing _I_ can fucking do about it": which is—true, so Alice takes a breath and lets Penny and Eliot slip back in, yanking the wards back up behind them while Eliot scrambles over to Quentin, still huddled up cross-legged on the sigil in the middle of the floor.

Penny stays with Alice and Kady by the door. Eliot sits down facing Quentin. His hand fluttering out: Quentin's hair, cheek, shoulder; and this is, Alice is thinking, watching it happen, precisely the kind of thing that has always made her—nuts, fucking _crazy_ : that Quentin just— _lets_ him, eyes fluttering shut, his hand coming up to squeeze at Eliot's wrist. It wasn't so bad, in first year, right up until it was terrible: in first year, Quentin had curled into Eliot's affection in a way that Alice—that she had thought she'd understood. Eliot was just—like that. He was so— _generous_ , with what he felt: how could you not let him, if he wanted to love you? But four years is a long goddamned time, and fifty is just—incomprehensible, to her, and sure, maybe she can lie around drinking wine that tastes like fruit punch and gross-crying with Eliot for all of September to get herself to some kind of peace with how Eliot feels about Quentin, and she can tell herself all she wants that people are complicated and you can love lots of people and still make promises to one and keep them if that's the kind of person that you want to be, but Alice still has absolutely no fucking peace whatsoever, over how _Quentin_ feels about _Eliot_. It's awful of her. She knows it's awful of her. She knows it's awful of her but she still fucking feels it: that horrible, selfish _pit_ inside her that is watching Eliot and Quentin bending towards each other, talking too quietly for her to hear; the way Eliot brushes his hand over Quentin's folded knee and Quentin's whole body just—leans towards him, while a hundred fucking miles away by the door everything inside Alice is still fucking screaming: _It should be me, if he loves me he should ask for_ me _, I want it to be_ me.

"So what's the plan, here, exactly?" Kady asks; and Alice tenses up. All over. 

"Margo and Sheila are setting up with Zelda, to build the golem," Penny says. "When we hopped back in they were talking about sending it in trailing that hedge mapping spell—"

"How do we know the golem won't just blow up immediately, if it goes into the mirror realm with an active spell attached to it?" Kady asks; and Penny shrugs.

"Honestly, if going into the mirror realm with an active spell attached is a problem, the golem's fucking doomed no matter what we do," Penny points out, which—okay. Perfectly true. Alice shifts.

"It nearly killed Eliot, when his golem died," she reminds them; and Kady nods.

"We should send in a, like—a bunny golem, or something," Kady says. "And I know just the bunny, that little twit Hodges still owes me two packs of cigarettes": and Alice shivers.

"We can't control a bunny golem," she says. "The talking rabbits are _not_ into taking instructions."

"That is actually not where I thought your objections would come in, on this one," Kady says, lifting an eyebrow.

"Yeah, well, it's been a long time since it didn't feel incredibly hypocritical to get squeamish about animal experimentation," Alice snaps; and Kady grins at her; so Alice.

Takes a half-step back. Straightening her sweater.

"Look," Alice says. "I'm all for getting one of the rabbits to do the exploration for us, if you can convince them to do it. Or—if you can convince them to do it, and then come back, after—"

"Why don't we just put it on a leash," Kady suggests, "and then reel it in?"

Alice shifts, a little; and Kady smiles at her, sharp. 

"I know," she says. "You're mad you didn't think of it first, and sort of shocked I thought of it at all."

"I'm not—shocked," Alice says, awkwardly; and Kady says, "Well—you are, but whatever, I was second in our year, before Brakebills South, you know": and Alice—

—can feel herself.

Flushing.

"Oh," Kady says, smile widening. "You _did_ know."

Penny clears his throat. "Hey," he asks, "so—not that this isn't—uh, but what happened to Margo's flask?"; and Alice looks down, fumbling with her skirt to dig it out of her pocket.

He takes a sip. Passes it to Kady, who takes a swig, then holds it out to Eliot, just coming over, who waves it away, so Kady hands it back to Alice, and Alice takes a long, burning swallow, blinking hard, while Eliot says, "Okay, so. Storytime, but first—is there a reason we didn't bring in, like, a cot or a sofa or something? He's fucking exhausted, so—"

"Too risky," Alice says. 

"High probability of explosions," Kady adds, "with all the wards on this place, and the sigil—it's bad enough I needed to bring my tattooing stuff in here. At least if there's spell blowback I can hold onto that, with furniture we'd just have. Sofa shrapnel, so—"

"No, got it," Eliot says, nodding. "What about—like, a yoga mat, or something? I know he's technically dead and everything but as far as I can tell he literally hasn't slept since July, and he's been—conscious, for most of that, so—"

"Jesus," Kady mutters, and scrubs at her face, then looks up at Alice, who hugs her arms tight over her chest.

"We can lower the wards," she says, "and bring in some sofa cushions, or something, but not—right now, okay, we need to—"

"Yeah," Eliot says. "Debrief, I got it. So—um." He laughs, a little. "So he thinks he's basically—linked. To the Monster. To _my_ Monster, specifically—"

"Um," Kady says. "I'm sorry, we threw the Monsters—"

"When you say 'linked,'" Alice interrupts; and Eliot nods.

"He's pretty sure that the birds he keeps talking about, in the—place with the plains," he says. "He thinks they're the Monsters. And one of them mostly ignores him, but the other—"

Eliot's ears redden, a little. 

"The other one's still got a visible-from-space crush on him?" Penny suggests.

"That's not how he put it, but reading between the lines—yeah, basically," Eliot says. "He says that the other one keeps paying attention to him. And there's—some kind of spell blowback, or something, that Quentin says is affecting both of them. That keeps—taking them apart, or—putting them back together again, which—"

"Again," Kady interrupts. "Monsters. Thrown into the Seam. By us. By _Quentin_ , which is how he actually—died, so—the whole idea of the Seam is supposed to be that nothing comes back to annoy us some more, so—"

"Okay, it's a nice thought," Eliot says. "Except—we are obviously in whole new territory, here, all right? Quentin talked to Penny—Penny 40, sorry, 23—and Q fucking thought he—gave up his regrets or whatever": the "whatever" comes out wobbly, and he. Scrubs his hands over his face. Breathing in, deep. "He thought he was—being shuffled along, to," he says, and his voice cracks. 

Alice shifts, not looking at him. She's never—she's never been so fucking embarrassed for someone in her life. 

Eliot breathes in, deep. 

"Look," he says, finally. "Quentin thought—we all thought— _Penny 40_ pretty clearly thought—that he was—done, okay? That that spell blowback, in the mirror realm, wasn't something you could come back from. But Quentin is pretty fucking obviously not done, and now he's bouncing around Earth and Fillory and the magical dead people subway and talking to—Monster-crows in some kind of—unmappable in-between space, and he—he thinks it has something to do with his spell."

Alice shifts. "Of course it has something to do with his spell," she says, flat. "His spell _killed_ him—"

"But his spell was _a mending spell_ ," Eliot says, sharp. "He didn't—he didn't get hit by a fucking—fireball, or whatever, magnified a billion times; he got hit by _a mending spell_ , reflecting out from a _mirror_ , which was also a _portal_ , and now he's fucking—sitting around in the Underworld's fucking—magical foyer, watching his body disintegrate and then put itself back together, and _it's happening to the Monster, too_."

"The Monster doesn't have a body," Alice says, and Eliot looks down at his feet.

"He could have had one, though," he says, finally. "He always—god-level power, Hermione. He could make entire worlds. He always could've built himself a body, that was never the problem—without his sister, he just couldn't remember _how_."

Alice swallows. "Wait," she says. "Are you saying—"

"I'm saying Quentin thinks—he thinks his spell is trying to pull him into the Monster, and the Monster into him," Eliot says. "And every time Quentin thinks about that, he starts freaking out, because he thinks that if _he's_ coming back, whatever's happening to him might be going to bring the Monster back, too."

Alice swallows. After a second, she takes another long drink of Margo's terrible Fillorian moonshine, and then passes the flask. This time, Eliot does take a sip. Wincing. 

"We can't let the Monster come back," Alice says, and then wipes her mouth; and Eliot huffs and then says, "If you do anything that hurts Quentin, I'll kill you"; and Alice takes a deep, slow breath.

"Okay, well, always good to know where you stand, with a friend," she says, as lightly as she can manage; and then rubs at her face, and goes over to Quentin. Sits opposite him, just inside the sigil, and Quentin looks up at her. Pale, bruise-eyed.

"Tell me everything," she says, and then, "you wanted to talk to him first, fine, you fucking talked to him—but I'm trying to figure out how to save your life, so talk to _me_ , now, Quentin"; and Quentin takes a deep breath—

—and does.

"That's an hour, Alice," Kady calls, while he's still explaining about watching his spell take apart the crow—

Alice looks up, just for a second: "Okay, thanks"; and when she looks back, Quentin is—even paler. "That's the longest you've ever stayed with us, then," she says. "We've been—keeping track." 

He nods. Trembling, a little. Eliot's fucking _right_ , damn him: Quentin desperately, desperately needs to sleep. Alice slides off her backpack, and gets out another bottle of juice and the hoodie. "You want to lie down for a sec, you can," she says, quiet, while he's drinking the juice. "Tuck this under your head. I'll—we'll find you a blanket or something, in a minute, but. Just for now. Eliot's got his backpack, too, you can—pull his hoodie over you, or something, if. You want." 

He looks down at his juice, silent. "Thanks," he says, quiet, and then tips his juice up; and Alice nods.

Takes a breath, slow.

"If you want to fuck Eliot, you can fuck Eliot," she says, chest tight; and Quentin jerks his head up, wide-eyed. Lowering his juice bottle. "But you need to fucking tell me," she says; and Quentin—

—licks over his mouth.

"I—Alice," he says; and then laughs, a little awkwardly. "I'm not—I don't. I haven't exactly. Been in a place where—"

"I'm just saying," she says, because—because she doesn't. She doesn't want to hear him fucking— _lying_ to her about it again: "You want to fuck Eliot you tell me and I'll—get over it, okay?"

Quentin looks away. Setting his juice down on the floor, in between the coils of the sigil.

"Alice," he says, not looking at her, "I haven't even— _thought_ about sex, since. Like." He breathes in deep. "December or something, I don't—"

"Don't lie to me," she snaps; and he flinches; and she. Takes a breath. In through her nose. Out through her mouth. 

Her heart is pounding, too-fast. It makes her feel. Dizzy. 

"Quentin." She takes another breath. Steadying. It should be—fucking _steadying_ , but she—"I really don't want to fight with you about this right now, okay? But—I can't take you lying to me, not—not about this, not again, so."

Quentin puts a hand over his eyes. Rubbing at the bridge of his nose. "I'm not lying to you," he says. Very quietly; and Alice sighs, and looks up at the ceiling.

"If your spell caught you and the Monster, it caught the mirror-portal between you, too," she says. Thinking. Aloud, sort of, with part of her: focus. Focus. _Focus_ — "And if it caught you, it probably caught Everett, too—and it may've caught the Monster's sister." It's the best she can do: thinking aloud, with a part of her. _I don't believe you_ , she is thinking, with the rest.

"I don't think it caught his sister," Quentin says. "I think—I think she's just. Being a crow, right now."

Alice rubs at her face. "This—space. The—it's pretty clearly not _just_ the seam, so—the plains."

"That's a thing, isn't it?" he asks. "The plains of the dead, or something? In mythology?"

"It sounds like something out of D&D," she says; and he says, "Well, I mean—it's not like the two are mutually exclusive"; and then rests his chin against his bent-up knees. Smiling at her, almost. He looks—fucking exhausted. There is a sharp, serrated blade of longing under her sternum: sometimes she wants to hate him, so, so fucking badly; and can't.

"How are you feeling?" she asks; and he rubs at his face. 

Shakes his head.

"Okay," she says, after a second. "I—okay."

Quentin nods, and rests his face on his knees.

"We're sending a golem into the mirror realm," she says, after a minute. "For—well, Sheila says it's key research and I don't exactly think she's wrong, so—we'll keep you in here, as long as we need to, we're trying to not drop the wards unless it's absolutely necessary because of the risk of you jumping, but—in. In an hour or so, after she's had—um. A little bit longer, then we'll—I'll send." Swallowing. "Kady, Penny, and I have to stay here. We need—anyway." She takes a breath. "But the next time I drop the wards I'll send Eliot to get you—something to sleep on, okay?"; and Quentin lifts up his face. "And then." Alice swallows. "I'll let him back in," she says.

"Wait." Quentin reaches for her wrist. "Vix."

And—

—the thing is. 

The thing is, the tone is just—wrong. 

It's so—so fucking _deliberate_ , she is thinking, aching all over; it's like—like he's fucking— _performing_ something, with his clammy hand on her skin, and Alice can feel—she can feel herself—she just. She just wants—to go fucking _back_ , back to where—she is trying so, so fucking hard to. To meet him where he is and not—not push him and not hurt him but how could he, how _could_ he, how could he take— _that_ , of all _fucking_ things, and make it into—

—into something that—

—he _forces_ , with her—

"I need to talk to Kady," she says, pushing up to her feet. "You need to stay inside the sigil. Um—we're doing. You know, research, so—until we know more, you." Breathing in. "If Penny's right and you're travelling, the wards will keep you in the room," she says. "Beyond that—I don't know. I'll do everything I can." Stepping back, as Quentin nods, his fingers slipping off her hand.

Alice goes over to Eliot and Penny and Kady, deep in conversation by the door. "What are we up to?" she asks; and Kady checks her pocketwatch, which has six hands and an astrological calendar: time in the Neitherlands is a strange, strange thing. 

"An hour and nine minutes, local time," Kady says. "Which is—with the temporal dilation—what is that, like—ten days, on Earth? He should've jumped by now, if he was going to."

"If he tried I didn't feel it," Penny says. "And—hitting these wards is like smashing full-speed into a concrete wall. I'm pretty sure I would've."

Alice nods. "He should be able to astral project, right?"

"If he were a traveler, he would be able to astral project," Penny corrects. "But—he's just. Human, so—"

"Is he?" Kady asks. "I mean—he _was_ , but—he's different in a few fucking ways, so—"

"How do you identify a traveler?" Eliot asks. "Like—how did Brakebills know it was your discipline, how did you—"

Penny snorts. "They didn't," he says. "They told me I was an illusionist and then the next morning I woke up in Flagstaff, Arizona."

"Wait." Alice jerks her head up. "You're an illusionist?"

Penny shakes his head. "No, I'm a traveler," he says.

"But you said they thought you were an illusionist," she persists. "Not a psychic? Our Penny was a psychic."

He tilts his head. "Well—my understanding is that travelers aren't really any one thing or the other," he says, slowly. "We'd be our own discipline entirely except that we're too rare, they don't get enough travelers through Brakebills to make it practical to give us our own house. And—I was strong in illusions, most of the magic I did before Brakebills was that sort of thing—street hustle, you know." He shrugs, a little. "They weren't wrong, exactly. They just weren't right, either."

Alice shifts. "Quentin didn't test into a discipline either," she says. "Not until he went into the past and Mayakovsky told him—"

"And Quentin's always been a good all-rounder," Eliot says: on her wavelength already, damn him. "Except for nature magic, he sucks at nature magic, but he used to do—shadow puppet shows for the village kids, that's illusion work, and he—he incepted the knight, didn't he? Can you do that if you're not a psychic?"

Penny spreads his hands. "How the fuck should I know?" he asks. 

"Honestly, the whole discipline thing is sort of bullshit, isn't it?" Kady says. "They tell us what our thing is and then teach us all exactly the same shit in class."

Alice nods. "And if he was doing all those instinctive translocation spells, as a kid—"

"But—okay, fine, this is all nice, except for how Quentin is definitely not a traveler," Penny insists. "I just—there's no way I can believe that he's been a traveler for the past four years, and somehow none of us ever noticed, that just seems—and sure, okay, maybe a physical kid can learn—a certain degree of astral projection, or illusion work, or whatever, but traveling is written into your _body_ , it's—I'm not wholly human, am I? But I've been way further into that fucker's head than I ever wanted to be, and believe me, I wouldn't call it _normal_ in there, or anything, but—human, yeah. He doesn't—look, if you don't believe me, get a mirror, have him cut his finger, and see if I can use his blood to open a bridge."

Alice lets out a breath. Shoulders back. 

"That," she says, after a minute, "might be the first good idea anyone's had all day."

"Um, except—that seems... really dangerous," Kady says, "to do in here, isn't it? We're going to have to—"

"We're going to open the actual bridge outside," Alice says. "And no one, _no one_ is going to go through it—I just want to see what happens. I bet—"

She hesitates.

"You think he _is_ a traveler," Eliot says, slowly. "You think—wouldn't we know? If he'd been able to travel, you don't think it would've—come up already, at some point?"

"Yes," Alice says; and Kady says, "You don't think Quentin was a traveler," quiet. "You think—you think he's a traveler _now_."

Alice licks her bottom lip. "I don't know what I think," she says, after a second. "But—traveler blood opens mirror portals, and the mirror realm is the space between two worlds—and travelers are hybrids. You said it yourself." 

She looks up at Penny, who nods, very very slowly. 

"So," Alice asks, "hybrids of _what_?"

After a second, Kady laughs. 

"Monsters and humans?" she asks. "Or the living and the dead?"

Alice doesn't look at her. "I don't know," she says; and then tucks her hair back. "I—don't know, okay? I just." She takes a breath. "There is _too much stuff_ , here," she says, finally, "that all feels like it's related, all this _stuff_ circling around—around the relationships between traveling, and mirror portals, and the seam, and—and all these things being melded together after they've been taken apart, for me to think it's a coincidence."

After a second, Eliot says, "You think—his mending spell."

" _I don't know what I think_ ," Alice repeats. "Except—except that I want to know if his blood can open a mirror bridge": and Eliot rubs at his face.

"Sure," he says, after a minute. "Yeah, I mean, cool, let's—slice him open again—"

"Don't be a drama queen," Kady snaps. "If you're squeamish, I can do it. If he _is_ a traveler I'm going to wind up tattooing the anchor spell onto him, anyway, I'm not precious about his ickle feelings, or whatever, so—"

"I can fucking do it," Eliot says. "But I need—"

"A prepared spell," Alice says, "and a vial. You can't cast in here. You need to be 100% ready to go before you come back."

He looks at her, mouth tightening. "Fine," he says, and then goes to the door; waiting while Penny goes over to check on Quentin, who has curled up on his side inside the sigil, with Alice's hoodie tucked under his cheek.

"Tell Zelda and Margo to use the rabbits," Alice says. "They have no self-preservation instinct and they smoke like chimneys, so—make a bunny golem, hook one to a leash, and send it through."

Eliot makes a face. "Is it awful that my first thought is how cute that'll be?"

Alice crosses her arms. "Uncomfortably cute," she agrees, annoyed; and Eliot nods, and rubs at his face.

Alice sighs. "Penny," she calls; and he looks up. Nods at her, so she drops the wards long enough for Eliot to slip back out.

And then, they wait.

"How long?" Alice asks Kady, after a while, and Kady takes out her watch.

"An hour forty-two," Kady says; just before Penny looks up, and says, "Guys—he's not breathing": and Alice scrambles over. Crouching down on the ground: "He was, until just a minute ago," Penny says, "asleep, but breathing—"

"I thought the wards were supposed to block him from traveling," Alice says; and Penny says, "He didn't travel, he just fucking— _died_ again"; but Alice hasn't got time for bullshit, already rolling Quentin onto his back, crouching next to his ribs; she doesn't bother trying to take his pulse: first thing you learn in First Aid for Babysitters is that almost no one can actually take a pulse right. She goes straight to chest compressions instead, so—so that's what she's doing, when Eliot knocks, and then knocks, and then knocks again. "Go lower the wards," she snaps at Penny; and then looks at Kady: her arms are exhausted. "Do you know—"

"Yeah, move over," Kady says; and Alice pulls back, letting Kady take over while she tries to catch her breath: Quentin flopped limp on his back across the sigil while Margo and Eliot—carrying a glass vial and two spell-scrolls and the blanket off Alice's office sofa—come scrambling in, to crouch on the floor next to them.

"What the hell happened?" Margo asks; while Penny is triggering the wards to re-raise.

"I thought you were helping Sheila with the golem," Alice manages, barely. Still breathless.

Margo waves a hand. "She got—what's his nuts, Oswaldo?"

Alice nods. "Ozzie," she says.

"Yeah, him," Margo says. "She got him to help her practice the golem-control spells while Zelda sets up the mirror and Jian Lun is contacting travelers. But, I mean, if Quentin—"

"If Quentin _is_ a traveler, he's obviously—sort of broken," Alice interjects, "so—maybe let's not just like... go there first, okay?"

Kady pulls back, panting. "Who else knows how to—"

"I do," Eliot says, and slides in next to her to take over. Chest compressions, two breaths. Chest compressions, two breaths. Chest compressions—

"Get back," Penny says, suddenly; and Eliot pulls back—

—just in time to watch a sun-bright ripple of amber magic shiver out all over Quentin's body—Jesus. His clothes disintegrating, skin unraveling: shriveling—peeling back—crumbling him down to—

"Jesus," Eliot says, thick, and puts his hands over his face—

—the fractalish architecture of his veins and arteries, and then those are disintegrating too, and then—

—even _Alice_ feels it, when Quentin slams into the wards, then slams back together; and Quentin jerks up to sitting, eyes huge, sucking in breath, wearing nothing but one shoe and the hoodie dangling off one arm while his jeans materialize fifteen feet away and his t-shirt drops onto Margo's head and then promptly starts smoking: she yanks it off, beating the flames out.

"The _actual fuck_ , Quentin," Margo snaps; and then Quentin's eyes roll back in his head, and he drops back onto the floor, unconscious.

Alice kneels up, reaching for his face: he's breathing, but barely. 

"Okay," Margo says. "Eliot—blanket. Kady, can you get—"; while Eliot is shaking the blanket out, and Alice helps him pull it over Quentin. Kady pushes up, and comes back with Quentin's jeans: Margo's already getting into Eliot's backpack for a slightly less-singed t-shirt. 

Alice looks up at Penny, whose mouth is pressed together. Flat and tight. Painful.

"That was traveling," she asks; and Penny nods.

"Yes," he says. "He is—definitely trying to travel. Just not all of him, not all to the same place."

He stops. Breathes in, very slowly: "And," he says, carefully, "not all of him _all at once_."

Alice heart thumps. Once. Twice. "Tattoo him," she says, to Kady, " _now_ ": and Eliot's head jerks up.

"The actual fuck," he says, "if he fucking— _dies_ again—"

"His underworld yo-yo impression isn't just a coincidence, Eliot," she interrupts. "He's dying because he's traveling and he's shitty at it. The wards can keep him in the room. The tattoo keeps his body _in his body_. You want to just wait around for his heart to stop again, hm?"

"How do you know you don't tattoo him, and then he goes wandering _anyway_?" Eliot says. "Astral projection, right? If everything's fucking—going wrong, all at once—"

"He's not breathing again," Penny says, sharp; and then slides to the side to give Kady room to work, while Eliot is yanking off the blanket: "Kady," Alice grinds out, during her fourth round of chest compressions, "are we—time": and then bends back down again: breathing out. Breathing out. Another two rounds and she trades with Eliot, feeling dizzy, a little bit sick: halfway through Eliot swapping with Kady, the spell kicks off again: that same brilliant-dizzying shimmer of magic, washing over the whole of him, head to toe. Taking. Him apart; while Penny snarls, "Get back": and Kady dives for her tattoo kit, while Quentin is slamming back into one piece: the hoodie showers around them in a storm of fabric confetti, while Eliot is pulling the blanket back over Quentin's bare chest, hands shaking. 

"El," Quentin croaks, one hand flailing up; "Hey," Eliot says, low. "We've got you, it's okay, hm? Hey, you—" Nonsense, really. 

"How the hell are we going to do this?" Kady asks. "If he drops dead again while I'm still sketching out the spell structure—"

"Then either it comes back when he reintegrates or we fix it after," Alice says, "we've got to fucking try."

—and then Quentin sighs, arm going limp in Eliot's hand, and doesn't breathe in again; and Alice has to get back to chest compressions, while Eliot yanks the blanket back out of her way.

"This is a fucking terrible idea," Eliot says, while Kady starts marking the guidelines for the first rune onto the underside of Quentin's arm. 

"It's the best we've got," Penny says; and Kady says, "It's the _only_ thing we've got."

"Can't we just—do some more research?" Eliot says, very weakly, like not even he buys it. "I'm not wild about trialing first-time-ever magical interventions on—"; and then Quentin disintegrates again, Alice and Kady flinching back while Penny yanks the blanket out of the reach of the spell as it evaporates Quentin into a gleaming hovering cloud of light and heat: "I mean," Margo is saying to Eliot, "call me crazy, but it seems like eventually we're going to need to do something about this?"; before Quentin smashes back together, taking one long deep agonized breath before he goes limp and still again; and Alice shuffles back over to restart chest compressions.

" _This_ , though?" Eliot asks, unhappily; and Alice—she'd thought she'd had long enough to catch her breath but apparently not so she pulls back, panting, "You"; and so Eliot kneels up. Bending forward. To the rhythm of the Bee-Gees: _a, a, a, a, stayin' alive, stayin' alive, a, a, a, a_ —

Alice takes a breath. Swallows. Takes a breath. Swallows—

"I'm ready," Kady says. "The second he comes back—"

"Do it," Alice says, and then takes a breath.

It takes another sixteen rounds, before Kady gets the tattoo done: by thirteen, Eliot is talking Margo and Penny through giving him a break so that Kady can keep tattooing, while Alice burns through both spell scrolls trying to draw enough blood for them to try anything, _anything_ with a mirror bridge.

"Okay," Kady says. "It'll take—about forty-five seconds, for me to activate it—"

"He's down to well under a minute, between jumps," Eliot pants, still looking weak and pale: Kady nods, while Alice finishes drawing blood and wraps the crook of Quentin's arm up with a shred of his last t-shirt.

"Then—I can do everything but the final hook while he's—uh, disintegrated, or whatever," Kady says, "but it's dangerous. I won't be able to check the tattoo, if I get too far along in the casting, I'll have to either just—drop the spell, or assume it came back okay and go for it—"

"Go for it," Alice says, tucking the vial of Quentin's blood in her skirt pocket; and Eliot laughs at her, while Margo says, "I need—" and Penny slides in across from her to take over. 

"You're very willing to make life-or-death decisions for him," Eliot says, low; and Alice snarls, "Well, one of us has to be."

"Hey!" Kady snaps. " _Both_ of you. I'm telling you, I don't have a choice, if we're going to do it I have to do it—"

"Now," Penny says, "Kady, just do it," scrabbling back; and Kady kneels up and starts casting, while Quentin's body is evaporating into hunks of muscle and bone and that same alive-devouring golden light that grinds it into a glittering golden powder; while Kady pants, and pants, and pants, hands moving; until Quentin's body snaps back together; and Kady grunts, pushing the spell out of herself, slamming her palms to the tattooed circle marked on the underside of Quentin's right arm.

Quentin breathes. Breathes in. Breathes out. Breathes in—

Alice kneels up, reaching over to steal Kady's pocket watch. Flipping it open to watch the second hand wind around from the four to the four to the four to the four—

"Five minutes," she says. Tense.

"He's still breathing," Margo says, quiet; then adds, quite unnecessarily, "He's not waking up."

Alice can't—she can't look away. The second hand crosses the four. The four. The four—

"Hey," Eliot is whispering. "Nnn—Q. _Baby_ ": and Alice with knives in her throat watches the second hand cross the four again; and then Kady closes her hand over the watch.

"It didn't work," Alice says. Mouth numb: and Kady.

Lets out a breath.

"It worked," Penny says, quiet. "He's not traveling": and Kady scrubs at her face.

"But he can still astral project," she mutters; and Alice. 

Swallows.

"Quentin," Eliot is whispering, "hey— _Q_ —." Brushing his knuckles over—and Alice pushes herself to her feet, and goes to drop the cleanroom wards. Step outside.

Alma is waiting. Looking—stressed out and queasy: "What the hell was going on in there?" she asks. "The meters—"

"I need every piece of data you collected, in my office, in twenty minutes," Alice says. "Sheila?"

"Level six," Alma says, "with Ozzie and Zelda"; and Alice nods. 

"Okay," she says. Straightens the hem of her sweater. "They're—we're going to need to move a comatose patient to the infirmary," she says. "And we're going to need to find places for everyone to sleep, in the residential wing. Can you—make that happen, Alma? I really need to—"

Her voice stops. Just—dries up, all at once: she could try to say—anything: a spell, her name, her favorite book; and nothing—nothing would fucking come out, so—

She swallows. Swallows.

"Twenty minutes," she manages, finally; and Alma nods; so Alice heads to the elevator. Pushes the button for Level Six; and steps out onto another dim, quiet grey floor.

They had to turn all the muffling spells up, after they opened the Library: there are so many more people than there used to be. Della Walker is standing beside an information kiosk, comparing notes with Whitley. Alice can still barely hear them when she walks right by. Della says something that she can see makes Whitley laugh, even though Alice can't hear it; and then Whitley touches Della's tie. The muffling spells stop, though, at the doorway into the Level 6 Laboratory. Walking in is like taking cotton out of her ears, but it doesn't seem to work on the rest of her. Inside, Sheila is standing facing her golem, in front of a mirror, reviewing a composition book with Zelda, while a small, waifish redheaded person perches on top of the filing cabinet, licking an ice cream cone. Ozzie is standing in the corner, shooting suspicious looks at the redhead. Alice raises an eyebrow at him, but he just shakes his head. Hands up.

"Um. Hi, I'm Alice Quinn," she says, coming over. "Head of the Order of the Neitherlands Library." She holds out her hand, and the redhead looks her over, head to toe, with a deeply unimpressed expression, then says, "Lee da Costa," and then goes back to their ice cream cone. 

After a second, Alice folds her hand back, and then takes a step over to Zelda and Sheila. "What happened?" she asks; and Zelda rolls her eyes up to the heavens. 

"Oh, a prank, really," she says. "They didn't mean anything by it, but—well. Youthful high spirits": so Alice looks to Sheila, who rolls her eyes.

"Yasmin's taking first shift in the mirror realm," Sheila explains, "Lee is her twin. Ozzie told Yasmin we were in a hurry, so Lee dropped Ozzie in the Thames"; and Alice.

Sighs.

"Okay," she says, "well—what's your status?"

"We tried first with animated clay with no consciousness—no problems," Sheila says, "now we're waiting for Normine's golem to come back," and nods down at a blue extend-a-leash trailing off her wrist, and into the mirror. There's a little fluffy blue pet bed behind her, a grey mini-lop asleep inside it.

Alice nods. "How long?"

"We're giving her half an hour to come back on her own," Sheila explains. "She gets huffy, if you pull on her leash. We're at..." She checks her watch. "A little over twenty minutes."

"Okay," Alice says; and Zelda—

—clears her throat. Very delicately.

"And," she says, "Quentin?"

Alice—doesn't want to answer, really. 

"Um—they're." She takes a breath. "The tattoo is working, we think," she says, finally. "He's—his body is alive, he's breathing, heartbeat, the whole—um. Thing, everything you could want, really, except." She swallows. "Except he won't wake up, so. They're moving him to the infirmary."

"Oh, God," Sheila says, quiet. Reaching out for her, and Alice shakes her head, stepping away.

"No," she says. "No, it's—Penny thinks he's astral projecting, it's—normal, probably, we just have to." She breathes in. "We'll figure it out," she says; and then clasps her hands. "Do we have another mirror?" she asks. "I—we took some blood, Penny—"

Her voice cracks.

Alice. Shifts, a little. She can't—

"We need to know if Penny can use Q's blood can open a mirror bridge, since—that's sort of our big outstanding question, isn't it?" She laughs, a little. "How you get from—Quentin Coldwater, dead physical kid, to—suddenly Quentin Coldwater, incredibly incompetent traveler—if he even _is_ a traveler—"

"Oh," Zelda says; and then straightens. "Well—surely we can arrange for—Lee, could you—"

"Yeah, sure," Lee says, and holds out their ice cream cone, which Alice takes, slightly bewildered. Lee kicks their knees apart and opens the top drawer of the filing cabinet, fishing out, in turn, a powder compact, a plug-in lighted magnifying mirror, and then a largish hand mirror, in which they regard themselves, preeningly, and then hop down, so they can lay it flat on top of the filing cabinet. "Blood?"

Mute, Alice fishes the vial out of her pocket, and hands it over.

"Hm," Lee says, and then uncorks it. Wets their fingers: and Alice looks away, just as Normine hops back through the portal, looking ruffled, and tries to bite Zelda's fingers, when she unhooks the leash. A long-haired copy of Lee in a pink dress follows the rabbit out, daintily wiping her bloody fingers on an elaborate lace handkerchief.

"Perfectly well behaved in every sense," Yasmin reports. "Except that she ate a potted plant that looked like it was made out of marble. I hope that isn't a problem."

"Well, I can't imagine it'll be fantastic for her digestion," Zelda says; and Normine croaks, "Lactose intolerant, puts brie on nachos"; and "I beg your pardon," Zelda says, sounding deeply offended, "I do use a spell for that."

"There you go," Lee says, holding out the hand mirror. "One mirror bridge, half-open": and Alice.

Takes it.

Hand trembling.

"All right." She clears her throat. "All right, I—"

"I'd have to go through it to open it the rest of the way, and I can't fit through that mirror," Lee adds. "So—"

"No, of course," Alice says. Quiet. "No, I—I understand." She takes a breath, and then fumbles out Kady's pocket watch: seven twenty-seven. Make it seven twenty-six, for starters. Alice brushes her fingers against the viscous-rippling surface of the mirror. "How long will it stay partially open?" Alice asks; and Lee squints up at her. 

"About fifteen minutes, maybe?" they guess. "I've never really—"

"Mine stay open for twenty," says Yasmin; and Lee reaches over and jabs her, hard, in the shoulder. Yasmin sticks out her tongue; and Alice looks up at Sheila.

"I have to go," she says. "I'm going to—um. See if I can." Breathing in, deep. "Get anything out of the cleanroom data—can you come find me, when you have some results? And—Lee, Yasmin, stay near the portal, so you can get out fast if you need to—and no one else except for the golem goes through. All right?"

Sheila nods, and so Alice—

—goes back to her office.

She'd taken Everett's old office, with some trepidation; Zelda had told her it was entirely appropriate, given her new role, but Alice still feels awkward in it. Not at home. Six weeks ago, before all of this started, Eliot had come—via portal, too, since Margo and Penny were doing reconnaissance in Fillory, even though it takes forty-five minutes to get to the Midtown portal and from there to the new half-completed hedge transit center in Poughkeepsie and from there to the Neitherlands—and spent two hours lying on her sofa bitching at her about her "decor." She'd barely been paying attention, trying to sort through the stacks and stacks of departmental memos that came in every time her back was turned. Finally Eliot had come over, resting his weight on his palm on her memos, and murmured, _Also, when was the last time you went outside?_

With those warm, terribly kind, hazel eyes.

A knock. 

Alice smoothes her skirt down, standing. "Come in," she says; and Kady comes in and drops a thick manila file folder on her desk.

"All the meter readings," Kady says, tapping the top. "Alma asked me to bring them up. Penny and I did our best to mark the timestamps where we knew what was happening."

Alice clears her throat, turning. Flipping the folder open. There's a long, rippling stream of a magical current measurements, on a paper that's folded up like an accordion: when Alice stretches it out, she sees a spike, followed by a dip, labeled in pencil: _Q. dies (1x) (?)_ , and then has to fold it up again.

Feeling. Her mouth, twisted up and knotted.

Like the sick, lopsided mess of feeling under her ribs.

"So," Kady says; and Alice says, "Thank you."

Looking up. 

Kady crosses her arms. "Do you mean you're done being a bitch about this?" she asks.

"Speaking realistically?" Alice ducks her head. "No, probably not."

Kady sighs. Boosting herself up onto the edge of Alice's desk, kicking her heels back against it.

After a second, Alice flips open the folder again. Folds the accordion chart out again. They'd lost count, at some point, of how many times Quentin's breathing had stopped, and so Kady and Penny had just bracketed the entire last fifty minutes or so of measurements with: _repeated deaths/disintegrations (N x ???)_. The meter readings look like a tumble dryer in a 9.0 earthquake. Amazing, really, how little Alice actually remembers, of—of any of that.

"I'm going to save him," Alice says, quiet, "and—then what."

Looking up.

Kady's shoulders hunch together. Her face ducked down. 

"Yeah," she says, quiet, "then what?"; and then—

—she looks up.

Alice swallows. "Do I just go back," she asks. "Do I just—pretend none of this ever happened, he didn't fucking—rip my heart out while I watched him do it, or—conspire with Penny to—keep me safe in the world's stupidest fucking—paternalistic bullshit way, or. Or _Eliot_ , am I supposed to—pretend it doesn't _matter_ to me, am I just—supposed to fucking _let it go_?" Her mouth. Tightening, as it pulls into a smile. It hurts. "Just because _Eliot_ can? Just because he's—a fucking. More-liberated, less-jealous, better person than me? Because _fuck him_ , if that's—what he needs from me, and—and what'm I supposed to do about the Library, Kady? Am I supposed to fucking—give up my office, and go back to— _Brakebills_ , or—or Manhattan, and just. Pretend again, to just be." Breathing in, deep. "Some smaller fucking version of myself, so that he can fucking." She jerks a hand, clumsy. Heart fluttering. 

"Know what to call me," she manages, somehow.

Throat tight.

Remembering the way that Quentin had said it: _Vix_ —.

So, so fucking sadly.

Kady huffs, a little. "I don't have any answers for you," she says, turning her face a little. Just enough to meet Alice's eyes.

Alice's heart throbs. A sick, squelching-unsteady lump under her ribs: what's it fucking— _good_ for, anyway—

Alice says, "I know," very quietly, and then presses up—

Toes.

Tongue.

Teeth.


	8. In Transit (Part I).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Okay," Quentin says. "What. The actual fuck."

"Service is delayed seven thousand, six hundred and fifty-six minutes, due to a problem on the tracks," says the PA; and Quentin opens his eyes.

The man with the walker. The woman in the blue trenchcoat.

And beside him: Brenna, asleep.

Quentin takes a breath. He doesn't—need to, does he. His heart isn't doing its level best to pound its way out of his ribcage. His heart isn't, as far as he can tell, doing any beating at all.

"Brenna," he says. Tongue thick. " _Brenna_ ": and then he reaches for her freckled square hand, resting on her knee; and his fingers go right through it.

He jerks back.

"Okay," he says. "What. The actual fuck."

 _Go lower the wards_ , he hears; and jumps. Like—Alice's voice, right next to his ear; and then he hears, _Quentin_ : murmured, just behind him, in that warm-dangerous Eliot-not-Eliot way—

—and he scrambles up to his feet and turns, heart pounding: to look at the shadowy reflection of the subway in its dark, dark windows.

The man with the walker. The woman in the blue trenchcoat. And—

 _Take my hand_ , says the Monster, wearing Eliot's face; and Quentin is—Quentin is there, he's right there, he's standing _right fucking there_ and _looking in a mirror_ , he should be— _there_ , but he's— _not_ , it's just—

 _Please, Quentin_ , the Monster says, low and urgent. _You're my friend._ Please—

—and Quentin's body, without asking him, reaches out a hand and touches the rippling-dark reflecting surface of the window—

—and he is standing, all alone, on the plains.

There is—nothing, still. Just flat razed miles of dried mud and dead-scraggly grass, and—and a quivering scrap of tan fabric, one end trapped under the rime of mud at his feet. Quentin bends down, and picks it up: it's a smooth, heavy wool, it's—familiar, it's—

—it's from Eliot's coat, he realizes. The long heavy coat that he'd helped Quentin slide on in Montclair. That Quentin had died in, half an hour later: and "Caw," says the crow, hopping a half-pace towards him, quiet.

Quentin sighs, and slips the scrap of fabric into his pocket, then sits down on the ground.

"Well, this is a fine kettle of fish you've got us into, Jane," he says, very quietly; and the crow hops closer still.

"Caw," it repeats; and then Quentin jumps, as Margo says, _the hell happened_ , right in his ear.

Quentin takes a breath.

"Okay," he says. "I—okay. Can you talk to me? I think I need you to talk to me, I—what's going on?"

The crow squawks at him again, and then ruffles up. Shakes its wings out—

—and then dissolves into a hovering glitter-gold cloud, and then resolidifies, as a boy.

Sharp-chinned.

Skinny.

Dark curly hair—

"Don't do that," Quentin says, sharp; and the boy shakes his head.

"I'm not," he says, and then tilts his head. "I'm trying not to," he corrects; and sits facing Quentin, tucking his knees up under his chin.

Quentin swallows. 

Like this, he looks—nine, maybe. A young-looking ten. It's a little hard to know: Teddy had actually been a little tall for his age until he was in his early teens—so had Quentin—but this boy isn't. This boy has long, long eyelashes, though, and looks heartbreakingly out of place in his t-shirt and jeans, and—and he has brown eyes, a very very dark chocolatey sort of brown; and Quentin can breathe again, almost.

"You're borrowing from him, though," Quentin says, and the kid's skinny shoulders hunch together under his t-shirt.

"I don't have very many people to borrow from," he explains; and then holds out a hand: and Quentin—

—shouldn't. 

_He hurt you_ , he hears, in Brenna's voice. _He hurt you, and looked like someone you loved while he did it_ —

— _He was a child_ , Quentin had told her. _I'm not—excusing it, or apologizing for it, but_ —

— _but I want to be able to forgive it_ , he is thinking; and he reaches out to take the Monster's little hand.

Then he is standing alone in a clearing and there are trees all around him and they are—so, so green, a green he's never seen, not even in Fillory. The trees are so, so green, arching up above him, and between their branches there is a sky shining a rich, sapphire blue, so clear and so bright that it's—painful, nearly; and there is a white-walled thatched-roof unfamiliar little cottage in front of him, with a bright red blanket hung over the doorway. 

Quentin swallows, and walks over, and pushes the blanket aside.

"Hello?" he calls; as Kady says, _Who else knows how_ : he doesn't jump, this time. Barely. Breathing in, as steadily as he can; as his eyes adjust to the dimness inside the cottage.

The cottage feels—wrong, in some way he can't totally identify. He's not sure why. The floor is packed dirt, which is—familiar; and there is a fire in the hearth, burning very very low. That's familiar, too. There is a low table, in the very center of the room, covered in bowls, and then Quentin realizes what's wrong: the furniture. There—isn't any, really: at least, there aren't any beds. Just—just the table, and in the corner, a rocking chair, which Quentin happens to know is an anachronism for the apparent age and level of technological development of the cottage.

He scrubs at his face. It doesn't matter. It probably doesn't—matter, or whatever: so he comes over and crouches beside the table, picking up the first bowl. Rosemary, by the look of it. He touches the bristly green sprigs, crushing them between his fingertips; and the sharp foresty smell of it rises up, filling him—

— _can't even manage to tell the difference between a weed and your dinner_ , Arielle says, laughing; and Quentin sets the bowl down.

Hands shaking.

"No," he says. "She's—she died. This isn't real. Don't—"

—and Quentin stumbles, slightly, outside the porch of a house he's never seen before. Four concrete steps up—a red doorframe—a brass mailbox, the number _27_ —

—and Quentin wakes up on the Metro.

"Brenna," he says; and then claps his hands together. "Brenna. _Brenna_ ": but she doesn't wake up; and then Quentin feels a sudden, sharp lurch in his gravity, and then—the nauseating impact of a spell, like back in first year, when he'd cast at Penny and it'd bounced off Emerson's Alloy and shattered every bone in his left arm; and Quentin's awareness splits like a kaleidoscope: hand hovering over Brenna's on the Metro while he sits knee-to-knee with the Monster in the plains and crushed rosemary fills his nose in the cottage that's no place whatsoever while he hovers fifteen feet above the sofa in the penthouse, looking down at Lissy bouncing in her playpen, saying, _bark! bark! bark bark!_ while he jerks awake, naked and sucking in breath, in the center of the circle of his friends on floor of a laboratory in the Library—

—and then he snaps back into himself, all in one place, shaky and nauseated, on the Underworld Metro.

"Okay," he says. Tongue thick. "Okay, I—Monster!" Pushing up to his feet, turning to look at the window, where he isn't reflected: he pushes his palm against it, yelling, " _Monster_! Whatever the fuck your name is, come on, asshole! What the _fuck_ is—"

—and he jerks back to the plains, as the little boy who isn't Eliot squeezes his hand.

"You're traveling," the boy says. "They're trying to stop you. They want take you away from me."

"That's because I'm _not fucking yours_ ," Quentin snarls; and the Monster nods.

"I know," he says. "I'm sorry. I want to help you. Will you let me?"

"I don't fucking _trust_ you," Quentin moans; and then yanks his hand back. Flattening it, shaking, over his eyes.

"I know," says the Monster. "You shouldn't." 

He sounds resigned.

And—fuck. Just— _fuck_ him, anyway: because in that moment he doesn't remind Quentin of Teddy and he doesn't remind Quentin of Eliot but he does, more than ever before, remind Quentin almost painfully of Stavi Widder, a half-feral, totally unsupervised boy who'd washed up in the village when Teddy was nine, and about whom Quentin and Eliot and Larot and all the other worried mums of the village (a category in which Larot readily included Quentin and Eliot, cheerfully and with no apparent sense of irony) had had six months of anxious one-on-one and small-group conferences. Stavi had been, by his own reckoning, a journeyman bard on a quest to the Bell Falls to seek a story that had been lost, there, by his grandfather's grandfather. The worried mums had seen an underfed fourteen-year-old, traveling alone, in winter, with holes in his boots and all the general self-preservation instincts of a depressed lemming. Stavi had spent a week sleeping in the puppy-pile of Larot's kids; and then six days sleeping in the Millers' barn with their milk-cow; and then four nights with them at the cottage, Eliot and Quentin and Teddy all crammed into the other bed and kicking (Teddy); before Daisy Baker had convinced her wife that they could use the help, and Stavi had gone to help them haul sacks of flour and learn how to turn a loaf and sleep in the warm pocket of their attic, until the snow cleared. When Quentin drops his hand from his face, he even— _looks_ more like Stavi, doesn't he: his hair is fairer, and finer, and his cheekbones at least ten percent less devastating. It makes it easier, looking at him.

Quentin swallows. "Thanks," he says, rough; and the Monster shrugs.

Looking down at his skinny knees, in his baggy jeans.

 _Tattoo him_ , Alice says; and Quentin takes a deep, slow breath.

"Are you jumping around, too?" Quentin asks; and the Monster nods.

"It's not as hard for me, though," he says. "I'm used to not being allowed to keep my body."

And that.

That, Quentin finds, is in fact excruciating: how calmly he says it. How matter-of-fact he is, about everything that's been done to him.

"You shouldn't—they shouldn't get to steal your body," Quentin tells him. "You should—it's not fair, you should get—you should get an actual _life_ , you never had a life, did you?"

And the Monster looks up at him, blinking brown eyes. "What do you mean?" he asks; and Quentin sighs.

"I mean—after you were born," Quentin says, as carefully as he can manage. "How long did you—uh. Get to keep your body, then? Your—first body, I guess."

The Monster's mouth tugs down, a little. "I don't remember," he says, and then hunches his shoulders together and says, "She won't tell me."

Quentin sighs. Nods, looking up at the sky.

The crow, circling.

 _If everything's fucking—going wrong_ , Eliot says, so close Quentin can practically— _feel_ it—

"I keep going to the apartment," the Monster says. "But not staying long enough to pet the puppy."

"Yeah," Quentin says, quiet; and then—blinks. "Wait," he says. "You can travel out of here?"

The Monster gives an awkward, embarrassed sort of shrug. "It makes her mad, too," he says. "She wants me to stay here. But—I keep trying to make things, so it's less ugly, but it's hard. I get bored."

Quentin can feel—his breath, moving in lungs he probably doesn't actually have; the wet corners of his mouth. 

"Can you take me?" he says, and the Monster frowns. "Can you—can you take me with you, or whatever," Quentin says, "can you show me? How to get back to the apartment?"

The Monster tilts his head—

—and Quentin feels that hard harsh _smack_ of magic and sees—the apartment—the bowl of rosemary—the woman in the blue trenchcoat—the number _27_ —a dizzying cloud of golden light reflecting everywhere so bright he can't see and then he jerks, hard, back into his body heart racing clammy all over reaching—reaching up for— 

"El," he manages, reaching— _warm_ : Eliot's hand catching Quentin's hollow shaking hand as Eliot is bending over him, whispering, "Hey, we've got you, it's okay, hm?" and Quentin is holding his hand and he squeezes and squeezes and squeezes—

—and then he jerks back to the cottage. Not their cottage. Not _either_ of their cottages—the smell of rosemary harsh in his sinuses.

He sets the bowl down. And then—

—and then he looks, really _looks_ , for the first time, at the table.

It's a work table, he is realizing. Recognizing. Eight smallish bowls and about fifteen tiny ones: the sort he and Arielle and Eliot had used to measure out the ingredients for the Queen Cake at midsummer; or all year round for abortifacients and antipyretics to trade for their eggs and their flour, the sort of little round stoneware measuring bowls they'd used when brewing Quentin's mood stabilizers and the anti-allergy tincture they'd given Teddy by the much-protested teaspoonful every evening between the equinoxes. In the larger bowls: rosemary, valerian, copper shavings, blue moss, crushed sandstone, worm casings, warm ashes, egg whites: and Quentin remembers the spell even before he touches the first two of the tiny bowls, so small they can't even hold as much as a shotglass: mercury, and essence of hemlock. The rest of the ingredients don't matter much, do they. Tansy Waterborough had offered him the recipe, the summer after Arielle had died: _The milk of the Underworld_ , she had told him, _To bring communion with those who have left us_ ; and then she had cackled wildly when Quentin had said, voice shaking, _Is that what you call suicide?_ , and shuffled Teddy away from her cart at the market. 

And Quentin knows, all at once, down to his bones, that he has been brought here because he is meant to perform the spell. 

He can— _remember_ it, is the thing: half the time he can't remember how to cast a proper locking ward, even though that was Brakebills Week Four, or something, but he can still fucking—remember every fucking word of some spell instructions he saw for maybe forty-five seconds, once, in an alternate timeline, ten years from now? He _remembers_ it, and he wouldn't—he wouldn't remember it unless he was meant to actually—to take the mortar and pestle, to grind the rosemary; mix in salt while distilling the valerian: two and a half hours to make the potion, and a half a second to—to just finally fucking _swallow_ it—

But.

But beside the bowls, on the right, is a knife—Arielle's knife, isn't it? He—he'd barely remembered it, until this moment, but—but that is Arielle's little steel-bladed folding-knife, a coming-of-age gift from her mother that Quentin and Eliot had used between her death and Teddy's thirteenth birthday: with the ding on the bone handle that had caught against Quentin's thumb when he honed it over and over until the blade curved and shortened, from all their years of use. It is resting just where he would've set it, if he were prepping a spell for his own casting—except that Quentin never did his own prep, on ingestibles, for safety reasons: either he prepped for Eliot, or Eliot prepped for him, and then they both always turned the handle before setting the knife in line with the edge of the table, behind the bowls, where it'd be safe and easy for someone with the opposite handedness to pick up, and where Teddy couldn't reach it until he was old enough to know better than to pick it up. It'd become such a habit, like starting the kettle boiling as soon as he was out of bed in the morning or double-checking all of Eliot's ingredient measurements, because if he were brewing a bottle of something they were going to trade to a village girl or sell to a worried mom with a sick baby or feed to their own goddamned son, Quentin was going to be _absolutely fucking sure_ that he knew what they were putting in it. They both were. They had—fifty fucking years, of being each other's backup, didn't they—

 _—and then a step to the left—_ , Arielle says, so close he can feel—her breath on her ear and her arm 'round his waist, pulling him—

—and Quentin clenches his teeth together, snaps the knife shut, and drops it into his pocket.

 _A step to the left, Quentin!_ says Arielle, more urgently; and Quentin nods, nods: says, "Okay, honey": then grabs the bowl of rosemary, scoops all the littler bowls into it at once, and chucks the lot into the fire.

There is a volcano-bright blazing blast of red-and-green light—

—and Quentin jerks back into himself on the Metro.

"Service is delayed," says the PA; and Quentin says, "Shut the fuck up"; but the PA just keeps trundling on, "—six thousand, eight hundred and sixty-four minutes," uncaring: " _Shut the fuck up_ ," he yells; as it finishes, "due to a problem on the tracks."

He stands up. "Brenna," he says, sharp; but he doesn't expect her to answer and she doesn't. " _Wake up_ ," he shouts; but no one hears him. "Wake the fuck—"

"Service is delayed six thousand, seven hundred and forty-eight minutes, due to a problem on the tracks," says the PA; and Quentin whirls, looking up at the ceiling: "Are you just _fucking_ with me?" he shouts: looking for—a fucking speaker, a—a goddamned security camera, _anything_ to interrupt the smooth dimensionless ceiling of the fucking— _pig train car_ , what the actual— "Are you just fucking— _toying_ with me": howling, nearly; "because _that was not a hundred and sixteen fucking minutes_!"

He is panting. His lungs—his fucking—lungs that aren't lungs working as hard as they can to pull air into his body that isn't a body, no fucking heartbeat, and then he notices—

—the woman, in the blue trenchcoat. Who is.

Still, frozen; just as she's been, since the first time he woke up; and holding—

—her fingers, loose and slack, just barely holding onto a cup of coffee.

"That was—that wasn't there," he says, and then turns, yelling, "That wasn't there, that _wasn't goddamned there_ , Jesus _fucking_ Christ—" and he shouldn't, he shouldn't be able to touch it, he knows that, he _knows_ it, he can't touch—Brenna, the one fucking person who actually fucking— _gives_ a shit about him, for some reason, in this entire fucking nightmare-prison of a metaphorical transit system, but his hand closes around the cup and he can feel it, he can hold it, the seams on the cardboard sleeve digging into his palm as he takes it from her and then lifts it up and then—fucking _looks_ : _SL 2x SR_ , says the sleeve, in blue Sharpie; and just under that, _Kady_.

"Fuck." Quentin takes a breath, and fumbles the sleeve off, pockets it: drops the cup on the floor because if you can't litter in the afterlife, really, when can you, but then—then all his autopilot responses kick in and he picks it up again, and shakes it out, and stuffs it into his other hoodie pocket; and then he shoves his way up the aisle of the train car, half-tripping over all the stilled, frozen, discarded limbs of the people lining the seats running up and down the sides: "Service is delayed six thousand, six hundred and seventy-six minutes, due to a problem on the tracks," says the PA; and Quentin yells, "Eat my entire goddamned ass!" and then grabs for the metal safety bar, just by the door—

—and jerks back into himself, his other self, another self, sitting on the top of the twisting staircase in the apartment.

In her pen, Lissy sits up. Looks straight at him, and barks.

Quentin lets out a breath.

"Hi, lucky puppy," says the Monster. He's crouched down, in his little-boy suit, reaching over the edge of her pen—and Lissy bounces up onto her back paws, wagging furiously, and tries to lick his fingers—

—and Quentin falls backwards, gasping, on the plains.

"Jesus," Quentin croaks, struggling back up to sitting; and across from him, the Monster pulls his knees up to his chin, looking unhappy.

"I can't make myself—stay," says the Monster. "I can't _stay_ anymore, every time I try to—it's like being attached to one of your _hair ties_ , Quentin," he says, with that same odd, practiced inflection on _hair ties_ , because they had had an ongoing disagreement about the maintenance of his—Eliot's—hair, which Quentin had kept threatening to cut _for_ him, if he didn't do something about cleaning it up; and the Monster hadn't liked it when Quentin spell-scrubbed it but he _had_ liked it when Quentin brushed it and that'd lead to a multi-week argument about—braids, somehow—

"Can you choose where you go?" Quentin asks; and the Monster frowns.

"Of course," he says; and Quentin nods, very slowly.

"The apartment," he says. "You're going to see Lissy": and the Monster tugs his knees up closer against his chest. Not answering. "Because I can't choose," Quentin says, thinking—

—and he snaps forward, dizzy and reeling, to stand at the base of the four concrete steps, leading up to a red-framed door and a brass mailbox: house number 27.

He breathes in. That sort of—cold, muddy-rot salt smell: he must be—near water, or—

—and then there is a sea of gold, liquid-moving everywhere around him: trailing through him, rippling out of him, dissolving him, remaking him: a half-million mirrored slivers of his face in his peripheral vision while he—

—feels himself jerked sideways, just for an instant, into his body with Alice's hands on his aching chest and her mouth on his mouth hearing—

—his own breath, cavernous, as he jerks back into some hollowed-out shell of himself, in the plains.

"Okay," Quentin says, gasping. Gasping. "I—okay." He laughs a little, unsteady. "Show me," he says, "I can—you want to learn how to make things? Fine, I can show you how to make things, but—I need you to show me, first. I need you to show me how to—"

—and Quentin can feel himself starting to—flutter—fly— _apart_ —

—and the Monster says, "Focus the heart of your seeing, behind the center of your forehead—"

—and Quentin thinks, _Home_ —

—and snaps into a clearing, before a cottage, beside a mosaic, in the heart of the Southern Orchard, in Fillory.

Breathing in, deep.

It's still—recognizable. Isn't it. Their old badly-hung door, the red paint still flaking off their shutters: but this isn't—home, not really, is it? It—never was, or—never will be, exactly, for him, will it? But he still—goes in, doesn't he: looking for something he barely knows if he will recognize. Two beds, still. No quilts. A cobwebby stack of firewood, and a pair of almanacs on the little shelf beside the fireplace. Not their vintage.

He closes his eyes and thinks: _No. Home._ Home—

—and when he opens his eyes again, he is sitting at one end of the window-seat at the front of the Cottage, at Brakebills; and Julia is curled up at the other.

"Julia," he says, startled; but she doesn't look up. " _Jules_ ": he repeats, and then—

—he snaps back into his body, knee-to-knee with the Monster, on the plains.

The Monster is holding his hands cupped on the mud in between them.

"Hello," he says, not looking up.

"Uh." Quentin swallows. "Hi."

"Not you," says the Monster, and then, "Look": and so Quentin—

—his body just—

— _doing_ it, just as requested, through habit of long practice, when a kid wants to show you something, with that tone of voice—

"Wow," Quentin says, looking up. He's not even faking it. "That is—that's amazing, that's really good, how'd you do that?"

And the Monster beams at him, and then, very carefully, uncups his hands.

The little sprig of plant trembles, a little, in the breeze.

"Wait, no, um—" Quentin fumbles with his hoodie. "Put your hands back, for a second": and so the Monster puts his hands back around it, while Quentin digs out Kady's coffee cup. Pulls the lid off, and then shakes it out on the ground, away from the Monster's little plant, just in case there's still—soy milk in it, or coffee, or whatever. Then he sets the cup down and casts, quick: just enough to open up the bottom, so that he can set the little ring of cardboard around the Monster's plant, to protect it from the wind.

The Monster lets out a little noise; and Quentin looks up, as.

As the Monster.

Scrubs at his cheeks, face ducked forward; and his eyes.

And makes that little sound again, hunching up, and Quentin, helpless, scoots over, chest aching, until—

—until he realizes, in a sudden, dizzying rush, that he's in—some awful side-annex of the afterlife, with his left arm arm around a nearly-omnipotent prepubescent boy who used to torture him, while he weeps over a plant.

"What's happening to me?" the Monster asks, voice thick; and Quentin—

—could let go. He could—push him away, and scream at him, and rage at him to let him go, to show him, to help him—

—but he.

Doesn't want to, for some reason.

"I think maybe you're remembering things," Quentin says, finally; and the Monster pulls his legs back up, so he can press his face down against the knees of his jeans.

"I don't want it to die this time," the Monster whispers; and then makes that tight, hurt little noise again. 

"Yeah," Quentin says, quiet. "Me neither": and the Monster nods.

Quentin swallows. "Hey," he says, after a minute. "Can you—how much control do you have, here?"

The Monster lifts his face up, wiping his hands over his eyes again. The heels of his hands are positively crusted with dirt: _Infection_ , sing-songs a small, impossible part of Quentin; but he shoves it down. "Control over what?" the Monster mumbles, and then turns his head to snuffle, wetly, against his sleeve rucked up against his shoulder.

"Sunshine?" Quentin hazards. "Weather? Um—can you make it—warmer? Can you make it rain? Plants need—water. Sunlight."

The Monster squints up at him; and then—a very small, very localized rainstorm bursts up above them, drenching them both.

"Right," Quentin says, after a second. "Cool": and then the Monster rests his head back against Quentin's soaked shoulder, while they wait for the rain to stop. 

There's something. Glinting, a little bit, in the mud, just to the right of the plant, as it quivers under the fall of the water. Quentin reaches out, and tangles his finger around the chain. Pulls, a very little: until an angled stone pulls free from the dirt: a sort of sunset-y orange-pink color, where the rain washes it cleaner.

Quentin turns it over. Wipes it off.

Puts it in his squelching soaked hoodie pocket, where—

"Sunshine?" Quentin asks, when the rain stops; and the Monster hums a little, uncertain; but slowly, very slowly, the oppressive grey of the sky lightens, slightly, and a weak, watery sunlight breaks through.

After a minute, the wind dies down.

After another, Quentin picks up Kady's coffee mug, to give the little plant room to grow.

They have to scoot back, before long.

"What is its name?" the Monster asks, when it's the size of a beach ball; and Quentin laughs, a little.

"I was always awful at botany," he says; but then takes a breath. "But," he says. "As it happens. I think I actually know this one." It had been on one of Alice's first batch of flashcards, in part because it hadn't been local, so the professors liked to use it to trip up first-years. "I'm—about eighty-five percent sure it's a _Retama raetam_ ," Quentin says. "White broom. Alice would know." He brushes his thumb over a sprig, just unfurling with creamy-soft flowers; it knocks a blossom free, by accident. He feels bad about it, immediately; and then immediately tries not to. _It was just an accident_ , he reminds himself. _It's not the end of the world_.

Besides.

It's—

—pretty.

"Why did I grow it?" the Monster asks; and Quentin sighs. Reaching over, to tuck the broken flower behind the Monster's little ear.

"I don't know," Quentin says, quiet. Smoothing the Monster's fine wet curls back away from his forehead. "But."

"But?" the Monster asks, after a minute; and Quentin shifts. His clothes are still just—absolutely fucking sodden. Both of them, Jesus. He twists his fingers, casting, very carefully: a modification on Eliot's hair-drying spell, with a little bit of warmth—just a _little_ bit—tucked in.

"In Arabic, they use the name to mean—a kind of reminder." The Monster snuggles back in against his side: drier, now. Quentin licks over his own empty mouth. "A string, tied around your finger," he explains.

"Why would you tie a string around your finger?" the Monster asks.

Quentin shrugs, a little. "To let you know you had something to remember."

"But how would that help?" The Monster's back is tensing, under Quentin's arm. "How would you know _what_ you're trying to remember?"

Quentin laughs, a little. "I'm not sure, honestly. But—it seems to work for some people. Just—to have a reminder that they've forgotten something."

The Monster doesn't answer, at first. Then he says, "I never know what it is that I've forgotten."

"No," Quentin says, quiet, "I know," and then closes his eyes; and when he opens them again they're in the apartment. Standing next to Lissy's playpen.

She sits immediately. Still wagging, a little: it keeps pushing her butt up off the ground, but she's trying so, so hard to sit still. She's getting so big. She barks, once, looking right at the Monster: "What is it, Liss?" says Pete; and walks right through Quentin, coming over. He picks her up: _That dog_ , Pete had said, skeptically, the first time he'd met her, _is never going to learn how to walk under her own power_ , but it'd taken him all of about four and a half days to be just as bad as all the rest of them: scooping her up for cuddles whenever he was over, carrying her everywhere her little squirming paddling indicated she wanted to go. Lissy rests her chin on Pete's shoulder, and barks sadly at the Monster.

"Hi, lucky puppy," the Monster says, very quietly, and then—

—then they are standing in the Urban Decay aisle of a Manhattan Sephora, and Quentin is looking at the felt-tipped eyeliner that Margo'd jammed into the back of a display of lipsticks: _Weird_ , he thinks, _someone should've fixed that by now_ , and then reaches out for it—

—and then they are standing, Quentin realizes, in the space that isn't the mirror realm and isn't the Seam but only because it is a vast, churning ball of magic, still bouncing around, writhing: with Quentin and the Monster and a mirror at its middle.

"Holy fucking Jesus," says a tall, heavyset woman, dressed like a Librarian, from the doorway—

—and then Quentin is standing, hand in hand with the Monster, on the Metro.

Still holding, somehow, Margo's eyeliner.

They are standing by what is, Quentin knows, where the door should go. It doesn't look like it has been or will be capable of opening, ever. It is totally sealed. The window is black. There is a small panel to the right of it, glass over an unassuming white button. The panel is red-framed, the edges marked in careful, all-white capital letters:

In Case Of Emergency: Brake Here

Quentin tilts his head, and puts Margo's eyeliner in his pocket. 

"Is that a typo, d'you think?" he asks.

"What do you mean?" asks the Monster.

Quentin shakes his head. Still holding the Monster's right hand, with his left. 

"Listen," Quentin says. "In case this doesn't work quite the way I want it to—do you want a name?"

The Monster looks up at him, eyes widening. "You know my name?"

Quentin shakes his head. "No, but I can give you a new one, if you want it," he says. "You could—keep it for now. Pick another one later, if you decide this one doesn't fit."

The Monster's face. It's so—small, and round, and his brown eyes are just—huge, God, if he _was_ a real little kid, face like that: he'd be a holy terror. "You can _do_ that?" he asks, uncertain; and Quentin swallows.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, you can. I think you have to, kiddo—there's no one left, who's going to tell you who to be."

The Monster's face crumples. "You're leaving me," he says; and Quentin shakes his head.

"I don't know what the fucking hell I'm doing," Quentin tells him, "but I'm done letting you pick for me, okay?"

And the Monster's face—

"You want to see me, come visit me in the apartment, okay?" Quentin says. "Now do you want a name or not?"; and the Monster lifts up his chin.

"Yes, please," he says, quiet; and Quentin nods.

"Service is delayed one thousand, nine hundred and fifty-two minutes, due to a problem on the tracks," says the PA; and Quentin says, "Yeah, but I'm done waiting," and brushes his thumb over the flower, tucked into the Monster's damp, slightly-frizzy brown curls.

"My name," says the Monster; and Quentin nods.

"Rotem. After your plant," Quentin says, "in Hebrew, it means—to bind." He swallows. "If I get to pick for you at all," he says, "that's what I'd choose. Just—be done breaking things apart, okay?"

The Monster swallows. Those huge, sad brown eyes: "Okay," he says, very quietly; and Quentin nods, and turns back, and smashes his hand through the glass over the panel.

It shouldn't work. All those times his hand went right through Brenna—

The lights go out.

When they come up again, Quentin is standing in the Station: almost alone, but not quite.

Across from him, Penny takes a deep, slow breath, and adjusts his tie. 

"Hi, Quentin," he says; and Quentin says, "Yeah, okay, hi, so—can you walk me back to the elevator?"

Penny's mouth quirks, a little. "This direction," he says, "I can't take the card for the fare."

"Ah." Quentin nods. "Yeah, I mean, I did wonder. So—okay, what is it?"

He digs around in his pocket. Fishes out—the sleeve, from Kady's fucking—soy latte, that he'd barfed on her shoes: "I guess it is sort of your kind of sentimental," he says, remembering Penny's fucking—chocolate wrapper, from Antarctica: he holds it the sleeve out.

Penny takes it. "That's one," he says; and slips it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

"I—what?"

"That's one," Penny says, very patiently. "But that doesn't cover the whole fare."

Quentin shifts. Tucking his hands in his pockets. Feeling—

"I've got—four," he says. "Four things left."

Penny lifts his eyebrows, smiling a little. "The fare is eight, in total," he says; and Quentin swallows.

He takes out the scrap of Eliot's jacket: "Does this even count?" he asks.

"I can't answer that for you," Penny says; and Quentin grinds his teeth together.

"It fucking counts," he says, holding it out. "I was naked. I was freezing, I was— _thirsty_ , he bought me a— _juice bottle_ —"

"Then that's two," Penny says; and pockets it, and Quentin takes out Arielle's knife, and hands it over.

"That's—that's a good knife," he says, throat tight. "Don't—it's a good knife, don't just—throw it away, or whatever—"

"I'll take care of it for you," Penny says, smiling a little. "That's three."

Quentin hands over the eyeliner. "Technically I shoplifted that," he says. "But I was, like—ambiguously a ghost while I did it, so I wasn't exactly—carrying my debit card, and also she'd—you know, left it there for me, sort of, so—"

"Noted," Penny agrees; and takes it from him. "That's four": and Quentin, ribs aching, takes out Julia's necklace, and drops it into Penny's outstretched hand.

"That," he says, "she. She definitely gave me that."

Penny nods. "I can take care of that one, too."

Quentin swallows. Tucks his hands back into his pockets.

"That's it," he says. "That's all I've got."

"Is it?" Penny asks. "That only makes five"; and then he raises an eyebrow, and glances down at—

—at Quentin's blood-stained, too-big grey sneakers.

Quentin crouches down. Fumbling with the knots: "You know," he says, "just because I was—catastrophically melting down at the time, or whatever, it still seems really—insulting, sort of, that other-Penny decided I needed him to like quadruple-knot my shoelaces."

"Take it up with him, my brother," Penny says; and Quentin just yanks them off, finally, without getting the knots more than about a third open, and hands them over.

"That's six," Penny says, very quietly, tucking them under his elbow; and then he holds out his hand.

Quentin breathes in. Breathes out. After a minute, he reaches into his back pocket, and fishes out his Underworld Metro Card—

"Ah," Penny says, taking it. Smiling, a little. "Actually, I do have to take that back, but I can't technically count it towards your fare."

"I haven't got anything else," Quentin says, low.

Penny raises his eyebrows. "Who're you missing, Quentin?" he asks: and Quentin lets out a long, slow breath.

"Alice," he says, very quietly; and then swallows. 

Penny raises his eyebrows. "And you don't have anything of hers?" he asks; and Quentin puts his hand over his right shoulder. 

The tattoo. _Both_ tattoos: because he can suddenly feel the other, a dull, searing sort of a throb, tucked between his ribs and his triceps. He lifts his elbow up, to look at it: the circle of runes, and the anchor. Still bleeding at its edges, a little.

"She gave me these," Quentin says, uncertainly, and then, "Can you _take_ a tattoo?"

"Kady gave you the tattoos," Penny says; and Quentin shakes his head.

"But it was Alice who figured it out," he says. "Alice—buried herself in books and made spreadsheets and bossed everyone around and she didn't fucking give up and she'd never fucking give in, she loved me as hard as she could in the most Alice way imaginable and if you tell me that doesn't count as her giving me anything—"

Penny lifts his hands up: "All right, all right," he says, half-laughing. Quentin's filthy fucking sneakers, slipping under his elbow. "It counts," he says. "That's seven."

And Quentin swallows. "I don't," he says—

—and then he stops.

_Who are you missing, Quentin?_

"Brenna," he says, and then closes his eyes shut tight. "Oh, God, I didn't—fuck, I didn't even get to say goodbye, I didn't—"

"It's okay," Penny says; and Quentin says, "No, it's _not_ , I didn't even— _thank_ her, I didn't—"

And Penny looks at him, smiling: so fucking warmly, God, sometimes Quentin fucking _hates_ him.

"Thank her for what, Quentin?"

Quentin swallows.

"I don't even know," he says, unsteady. Shakes his head. "She—she fucking—she sat next to me. She made—shitty jokes about hell, she—she held my hand, she was a voice that wasn't in my own fucked-up fucking head—"

"Seven, Quentin," Penny reminds him, "you have to give me something": and Quentin takes a deep, slow breath.

He is—remembering—

—that sort of—cold, muddy-rot salt smell—

"Her sister," Quentin says, "in Poughkeepsie," mouth numb—

And Penny says, "Eight."

—and then Quentin is standing at the base of four concrete steps, leading up to a red-framed door, with a brass mailbox and a number-plate that says 27.

The door opens, and a heavyset redhead in a bathrobe shuffles out to squint out into the sunrise. She looks—just like Brenna, Quentin is thinking, with an odd, off-balance pang: but—of course she does. It's not like he hadn't expected—

"You know, I can feel you, every time you project in through my wards," she says, and then yawns. "It's not even seven in the morning. Rude as hell, kid."

He blinks. "You can see me," he says; and she rolls her eyes: "you're a traveler," Quentin realizes; and she sighs, and waves a hand.

"I'm a painter," she says. "And it's freezing out here, if you're still attached to a body." She steps back, holding the door open, and asks, "Are you coming in or not?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The remaining four sections of this are (I think?) significantly longer—I'm ~~not great at~~ fucking terrible at judging length before I write something, but I'm guessing they'll be in the 12-18k range, probably, rather than the 3-8k range, so give me a little extra time to finish them (like, a couple weeks apiece). I'll get 'em out as quick as I can, I promise. Thanks for sticking with me, everyone. ♥


End file.
